In this paper, we examined how the diversity of students and their dialogical attitudes influence the evaluations of group activities. The students participated in group activities and held discussions to reach final evaluations in groups with diversity. This paper focuses on two types of dialogical attitudes, (i) psychological safety and (ii) leadership behavior. This study revealed that when the diversity of members was high, both psychological safety and leadership behavior tended to be rated high, and the final rating was also high. As a result, there is room for debate regarding the two scales used as dialogical attitudes. Despite the challenge, it is therefore necessary to develop more valid and reliable scales in the future.

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A simple educational tool was prepared and practiced for learning electronic configuration of atoms and molecules. This tool consisted of an A4 size sheet for the simulation of electronic configuration of an atom on the front side, and that of a molecule on the back side, and sixteen round counting chips (19 mm o.d.) indicating electron spin (s) of a lone and paired electron (s) on the front and back side. This tool was possible to simulate the ground state electron configuration of atoms from hydrogen to zinc, and of homonuclear diatomic molecules from hydrogen to neon on the periodic table. It was inferred that the tool was useful for understanding and explaining these electronic configurations from the results of questionnaires for the first-year students.

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A portable and simple educational tool was prepared for learning Lewis structures in chemistry. This tool consisted of thirteen round magnetic chips (25 mm o.d.) , twenty-five smaller (18×8 mm) and two larger (26×10 mm) square ones indicating an element of an atom, an electron pair or bond, and an ionic balance, respectively, on the front and back sides. All these chips were packed in a mini ziplock bag (5×7 cm) for portable use. More than fifty Lewis structures of molecules and ions in total were possible to be constructed by putting suitable magnetic chips regularly on a whiteboard. When this tool was used in an online chemistry class for first-year students, it was inferred that it helped understanding Lewis structures of chemical species from the result of questionnaires for the students.

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We prepared a simple water gauge consisted of transparent acrylic resin tube filled up with water and a pressure sensor and we showed that the water gauge can be introduced to several experiments in engineering as a teaching tool. Because of the design of great simplicity, it is easy for students who know fundamental physics to understand how to calculate the water level from the pressure value. To confirm this, we introduced the measurement of water level inside a tall large water tank using the water gauge to hydromechanics experiment. The students understood the principle of the measurement and succeeded in determining the water level by measuring the pressure. The calculated water levels from the pressure values were equal to the water level on the scale of the tank with an experimental error of less than 1 percent. Besides hydromechanics experiment, the measurements of the water level using the water gauge are probably available for basic engineering, chemical engineering, and creative engineering experiments.

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I improved the CPU simulator so that it can be used with Excel online. In the previous simulator, the simulation was performed by using a VBA program. However, some students could not use the simulator because they could not use Excel due to differences in operating systems. Therefore, in order to make the simulator available to all students, the simulation is performed using Excel Online. However, VBA programs are not available in Excel Online. Therefore, I improved the CPU simulator so that it can be simulated using only cell functions. In the new simulator, repetitive structures are expanded and expressed as a program without repetitive structures. In this paper, I report on the CPU simulator realized with only cell functions.

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Educating engineers who can be involved in automobile development requires expertise in mechanical, electrical, and information systems. Until now, there has been specialized education in each field. However, there were few practical educational cases in which specialized fields were integrated into vehicles. In addition, there was no teaching material that could effectively and inexpensively teach each of “driving environment sensing,” “driving behavior generation,” and “vehicle motion control,” which are essential basic technologies for realizing autonomous driving. The purpose of this study is to develop “KaitCV”, an automatic driving learning support teaching material that uses simple and inexpensive teaching materials such as hobby cars, so that all students can practice the acquisition of automatic driving technology. In addition, I will explain that the educational practice was carried out using the developed teaching materials and that a high educational effect was obtained.

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This paper describes a style of basic experiments of engineering that has been developed with engineering design education in mind. Since 2011, it has been mandatory to provide the following when submitting a report: an “Evaluation Checklist” that facilitates a self-evaluation of the achievement status and an “Engineering Design Skills Report” that encourages self-learning with an awareness of engineering design skills training. In addition, for basic experiments of engineering in the second grade, facilitation techniques have been introduced and initiatives such as arranging separate discussion times have been adopted. Furthermore, as a result of introducing continuous educational improvements while conducting a questionnaire every year, it has been determined that many students can acquire communication skills and teamwork skills through basic experiments of engineering.

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Lambert-Beer law is a combination of Lambert′s law and Beer′s law. Lambert′s law states that absorbance is proportional to the optical path length through a solution, and Beer′s law states that absorbance is proportional to the concentration of the solution. This law is also related to the principle of pulse oximeters, which measure the saturation fraction of the oxygen in blood, and is therefore an important law in the education of physics, chemistry, and biology in the medical field. In this paper, I report on a simple experimental method of measuring absorbance using a laser pointer and a digital illuminometer to teach the concept of Lambert-Beer law.

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Students of KOSEN, Colleges of Technology, have long suffered from low English proficiency, which is below the level expected of newly graduated engineers to efficiently work in a global society. For years, students′ exposure to English seemed to be insufficient and the minimum exposure time that will lead to any improvement was unknown. In this paper, the authors estimated the necessary length of exposure by analyzing the total time when the students were exposed to English without any Japanese interference and related it with the students′ TOEIC scores. It was found that a minimum of 170 hours was necessary to score around 450 points, while at least 300 hours was needed to score around 600 points in the TOEIC test.

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Generally, the acquirement of professional knowledge and skills for engineering is the essence of Kosen (Japanese colleges of technology) education. This research aims to analyze the elements of quality assurance of the Kosen education system from external evaluations. This research is based on the external evaluation and accreditation data from National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education (NIAD-QE). The result from the quantitative text analysis reported that significant educational achievements of technical colleges included graduate attributes such as knowledge and ability. Furthermore, the quality elements from external evaluations were discussed compared to quality elements from internal evaluations in the Kosen from the viewpoints of the knowledge and skill acquirement for professional engineers.

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We introduced active learning; for example, poster tour, and jigsaw method, to the existing classroom lectures in the educational programs of KOSEN. Based on student questionnaires and grade information, the implementation flow and selection guidelines for the five class formats are presented.

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As of 2021, the demand for online lectures has increased, and it has become difficult to understand students′ learning status in programming practice classes. Therefore, to effectively enhance learners′ motivation and ability even in online lectures, we developed an online programming environment that allows teachers to monitor how learners are programming in real-time. Our environment is flexible enough to support practical application development exercises, and the operation logs are recorded in detail. We introduced our environment to a hybrid lecture, including online and face-to-face lectures, and the analysis results showed some tendencies, such as the higher the grade, the more often the program was executed. The questionnaire survey results showed that about 90% of the students gave a positive opinion, but some improvements were found to be necessary. In the future, we will work on implementing features that were deemed necessary to improve the quality of the lecture.

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This study aimed to investigate the effect of the duration of internships on the efficiency of graduate students majoring in engineering. The results produced two main points. The first is that the more the participation in long-term internships, the more effective they tend to be. However, “one-day internships” may be also effective in terms of industry/company research. The second is that internships lasting from two to five days are ineffective with a negative correlation between them and their effect in all areas. The study found a significant relationship between the duration of internships and their effectiveness, which remains non-uniform and straightforward and has been clarified for the first time in this study.

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Team activities with conscious Problem-Based Learning which challenges the problems of physics written in English and gives presentations to other students were conducted in face-to-face classes of “basic physics” whose most of students were not good at English and physics. According to surveys of questionnaire, students′ hope to make one′s own decision to select the themes and problems was growing and they felt more “intellectual challenging” to the problems and text written in English with progression of their project. To compare with the data of remote classes which were not able to conduct the team activities and challenge the problems of physics written in English alone, I found that these tendencies and other effects came from the team activities.

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Patent and intellectual property rights have now become very important to strengthen Japan′s international competitiveness of products. Against that background, the cabinet office held a strategic development and utilization of intellectual property human resources as a significant issue in 2015. Because so, people pay more attention to intellectual property education. And the report of practical examples is on the increase. In this paper, we have introduced the lecture′s contents and will be reporting on the considered effectiveness of the education. We conducted intellectual property education as a lecture. Furthermore, we have participated in a related patent contest.

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This paper proposed a new type of a decision-making method which took in Futurability Education. The aim of the education is to bring out the futurability which human beings have potentially and to cultivate the strong decision-making based on future design. The Futurability Education consists of 3 steps. The first step is to perceive the futurability through simple exercises to retrospect the past cooperation and reduction of the burden. The second step is training of ability to think oneself and the society under the two positions of present generations and imaginary future generations. The last step is to compare the opinions of both generations and to judge impartially under the neutral position. As the results of several exercises based on the 3 steps, it is suggested that the proposed method is effective to promote and cultivate the futurability.

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We attempted to raise innovation ability of students through extracurricular activities such as idea contests, business model competition, exhibition about this project at on-campus events, event management outside the university, and individual and group “thing” and “knowledge” creation. One year after the start of this project, the majority of students felt that they had grown in a wide range of areas, including communication skills, cooperativeness, planning and execution, creativity, problem finding and solving, information gathering, teamwork, consensus building, and initiative. In particular, they felt that they had acquired teamwork skills, so it is thought that they got the foundation for becoming innovative human resources.

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As informatics education becomes more sophisticated and specialized, individual differences in learners′ understanding and weaknesses may increase. At universities, it is necessary to consider these circumstances when constructing classes. In this study, we investigated consciousness, learning environment, and informatics skills for new students. Furthermore, we classified new students into three types based on their weaknesses and motivation by cluster analysis. Based on the relationship between these types, learning environment, informatics skills, and grades, we examined lesson improvement plans for basic informatics subjects.

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Technical staffs who support student exercises and practices must consider safety not only for themselves but also for the students. Three risk assessment trainings were conducted for novice technical staffs to clarify dangers in their work and to establish a safe and healthy work environment. These trainings promoted an understanding of risk assessment and had an effect of making safe and healthy activities more actively. After the risk assessment training it is important for novice technical staffs to be able to recognize that the hazards in the workplace can affect their own hazards.

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An English course taught in collaboration with Engineering course teachers were offered at Hachinohe-KOSEN. First, second, and third year students (n = 110) enrolled in the course took an optional survey to evaluate the course. Although they responded that the course was difficult, most students enjoyed it and felt there would be future benefits.

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Underwater robot competitions provide students with the opportunity to voluntarily learn engineering knowledge and skills. It is expected that students will be interested in the marine engineering and manufacturing by participating in such underwater robot competitions, and that interest will lead to motivation for university learning. In this study, we will conduct extracurricular activities for 8 students for about half a year with the aim of participating in underwater robot competitions, and evaluate their educational effectiveness. In the evaluation, changes in interest in the marine engineering and manufacturing were evaluated by questionnaire. In addition, changes in learning motivation were evaluated from the university GPA from 2018 to 2020. As a result, it was confirmed that the participating students were interested in the marine engineering and manufacturing through extracurricular activities and maintained high learning motivation.

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We have developed an e-learning system and are using it for student experiments and lectures in science and engineering. The e-learning system can evaluate several types of student answers, including numerical values, algebraic formulas and short movies. In addition, it is possible to evaluate the numerical values calculated from experimental data by creating a Maxima program, which is a characteristic feature of the system. By presenting typical e-learning contents, we will show you useful functions of the system in detail.

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With increasing globalisation, English has established itself as the lingua franca of the world. In Japan, however, many continue to feel insecure about the English language, despite being fully aware of its importance. Speaking, in particular, poses a major mental block whose alleviation is an important task we must undertake. The discomfort stems partly from not knowing how to make use of the English knowledge people already have. Rephrasing messages into simpler terms empowers individuals to communicate effectively using their current linguistic knowledge. We considered whether experiencing such a method firsthand would help dial down our students′ hesitancy. This paper discusses our use of a motion picture to investigate its effect in reducing students′ reluctance to learn English and improving their impression of the language. The results demonstrated a certain level of success in alleviating the mental block many students have toward English language learning.

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A course of mechanical design in a university utilizing CAE structural analyses is reported. To learn practical mechanical design, basic knowledge of structural analyses as well as technical skills to use CAE software were taught. In a textbook of this course, fundamental concept of the structural analysis and background theory of finite element analyses were described. Through workshop problems, learners conducted structural analyses in a CAE software and compared its results to the theory learned in the textbook. The learner was instructed to summarize values and images of the results from the CAE software and the theoretical calculation into the worksheets provided. As the final project of the course, the learners designed their original structure under restrictions based on functionality, strength and weight.

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Polymer materials have many advantages (e.g. light weight, processability, and corrosion resistance) and their uses are expanding. They are also expected to withstand long-term use even in harsher environments. However, the reliability data of polymer materials are often not disclosed. We will learn the characteristics of materials systematically, acquire the methods of evaluation and calculation, and establish the method which enables life span estimation in a short period of time.

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The Corona disaster has been prolonged. Therefore, there is a need for the development of online classes that allow students to interact and collaborate with each other and with faculty members. In 2020, the creative engineering training program was held at Tohoku University, and facilitation exercises were conducted online on the subject of smart house creation. We were able to realize online engineering facilitation, which has traditionally been conducted face-to-face. Students who had never met before, including both science and humanities majors, were able to learn creative problem-solving techniques through online communication. A questionnaire to measure the effectiveness of the training revealed that all members felt that they were more active and contributed more to the discussions.

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In this paper, we examined practical education of intellectual property using a simple patent search based on the authors′ corporate experience in the department of chemical and biological engineering of the technical college. We took up the subjects of “the basic PBL exercise” and “the graduation research” as a case study. In the basic PBL exercise classes in the 4th year of this department, students could utilize the knowledge gained from intellectual property education at the partner university; they adopted an “intellectual property perspective” when giving presentations of their ideas. Furthermore, in the graduation research of the 4th and 5th years of the department, they obtained research guidelines by searching and understanding patent documents written in Japanese and giving presentations. Some of the students finally achieved good results for presentations at academic conferences. In the future, it is desirable to increase the number of faculty members who can provide intellectual property education through inter-departmental collaboration in the college and incorporate the intellectual property into the subjects on generic skills for lower grade students.

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