The Future of Education

The purposes of this study are to discuss what kind of educational program should be offered to first to third-year students, so that they will be able to engage in advanced active learning in the fourth to fifth years at Kanazawa Technical College (hereinafter called “the College”), develop and implement an educational program. Here, the advanced active learning means a PBL for improving the ability to solve problems through project activities, which is implemented in engineering departments.
From the educational experiences of the authors, it can be said that the factors in degrading the level of students’ activity in PBL are (1) the lack of technical knowledge, which leads to the proposal for makeshift solutions, and (2) the lack of “communication skills” of team members (who cannot convey their opinions to a third party accurately), which hinders teamwork and active thinking among team members. The problem (1) can be solved with the advice of teachers serving as facilitators. For solving the problem (2), we should have students acquire “communication skills” before group work classes. The communication skills will be necessary when they accurately explain the purposes, effects, etc. of design to team members and share information as engineers during a project or the like.
In this study, we discuss what kind of educational program is required for first to third-year students of colleges of technology (before entering a university) so that they will be able to engage in project-based learning (PBL) smoothly in the fourth to fifth years of college (early undergraduate years).
In this paper, we developed an educational program including “an animation work.” Students use an animation as a communication means, and aim to convey what they want to express to a third party accurately. Before challenging PBL, students have improved communications skills to conveying their opinion to a third party in our exercise programs.

Keywords: Animation, Engineering Design, Active Learning.

References:

[1] Takemata, K., Minamide, A., Kodaka A. and Yamada H. “Engineering Design Education based on the CDIO Approach”, 19th International Conference on Engineering Education, Zagreb, Zadar (Croatia), 2015, pp. 759-766.
[2] Bonwell, C.C. and Eison J.A. “Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom”,1991, Jossey-Bas.