In order to improve the understanding for an exercise problem, it is important to grasp the relations between the problem and the other ones. Several learning methods where students change the original problem into other problems have already proposed as promising ones to promote the problem understanding. The approaches, however, do not include any concrete ways to create feedback for students concerning the problem changes. The problem change for learning is a personal activity that strongly needs personal assistance depending on each student’s behavior. Based on these considerations, we have designed and developed an interactive environment for learning by problem-change. In this paper, evaluation of the learning environment through an experimental use for two weeks (two hundred and twenty-five minutes totally) by seven subjects is also described.

Environmental problems are becoming serious by human economic activities. With international concern about global warming problem, the Kyoto protocol was adopted in 1997. It is necessary for human who has been facing environmental problems to build a sustainable society in which economic activities coexist with nature. To realize such goals, it is essential to promote and enhance environmental education which enables to learn the importance of balance between environment and economy. This study thus aims to develop a board game ﾒEcopolyﾓ based on the Kyoto protocol and the estate dealings game. The game enables to learn relationship between environmental problems and their economic activities and to get knowledge of environmental problems by 61 event cards. Experimental testing of the game was conducted as subjects of 25 high school students. As for 10 quizzes on environmental problems, 4.1 of the questions were answered correctly, and after the experiment, the number went up to 7.2. According to the questionnaires, all students answered they recognized the importance of balancing environment and economy. It is thus possible to conclude that validity of the game in terms of environmental education was verified.

We have developed a sequential text presentation system using mobile phones for hearing impaired persons. And we have developed a system that presents speech content using sentences containing kana and kanji characters that are presented with ideogram alongside each kanji character. The paper contains a description of the construction, functions of the system. We used the system in a lecture. After the lecture, we distributed questionnaires to the hearing impaired students to inquire about the effectiveness of the system. By analyzing the questionnaire results, we were able to verify the system’s effectiveness and usefulness.

Some academic societies for education were interested in and studied the education of developments of solids. We can find their various contributions to the usual education of developments that is conducted with handicraft tools such as papers, scissors and pastes. On the other hand, computer environments in elementary schools are getting better, and therefore, the use of an electronic tool in the education of developments of solids can be regarded as an important means that leads to higher educational effect. A few electronic tools were developed, but an effect of class using such an electronic tool was not verified in terms of academic ability. We developed another electronic tool “TENKAI” for learning developments of a cube and a rectangular parallelepiped. To verify an effect of class using TENKAI in terms of academic ability, we set a control group and an experimental group, and conducted experimental classes on developments. The experimental classes were conducted with a normal method for the control group; and conducted with TENKAI for the experimental group. Consequently, the academic ability in the experimental group tended to be higher than that in the control group.

The approach of current clinical practice that assisted communication was reconsidered in this report, and it proposed a new communication-assisted system by an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). It was thought that it was extremely useful to apply the BCI technology from the consideration of positive study results by the EEG application in recent years to the communication support of sever neuromuscular disease person (child) and the high cervical spinal cord injury person. Moreover, it was thought that the offer of a realistic problem solution strategy was necessary in a grasp and a more immediate target of needs of an extremely difficult object person to communicate, and the introduction of the BCI system that considered an individual condition progress characteristic was extremely important when clinical was introduced. I think about study results of a rapidly advanced brain science field and neither the social cognition nor the understanding of the BCI technology are necessarily thought to be mature now at the time of be being applied to clinical practice immediately. It is thought that a more positive discussion and the verification with the society that accepts as the BCI application are greatly related to the development of the BCI technology in the future.