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Session 2793

Introductory Design Project in Engineering Design Course to Freshmen at Kanazawa Institute of Technology

Masakatsu Matsuishi, Kazuya Takemata, Tetsuro Furukawa and Shigeo Matsumoto ASEE/JSEE JSEE/JEICE HTSJ/JSER JSEE/JSME

1. Introduction

Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) is one of the first universities who are conducting Engineering Design Education (EDE) in Japan. The objectives of EDE are to provide students not only with superior technical capabilities, but also to enable them to identify and solve ill-defined and open-ended problems, to generate a set of distinct and creative concepts and to implement the Engineering Design Process, while working as a team. Furthermore, EDE is also to encourage students to acquire important skills such as those of communication and leadership1).

Original engineering design courses, which were introduced in 1996, were consisted of two sophomore-level classes; Engineering Design I (EDI) and Engineering Design II (EDII). EDI and EDII were taught respectively to all sophomore engineering students, composed of approximately 2,000 students every year. As part of a university-wide curriculum review, KIT decided to reform EDI and EDII during the 1998-1999 academic year. A new curriculum has been introduced in which EDI be taught in the Fall Quarter of the freshman year and EDII be taught in the Winter Quarter of the sophomore year2).

One of the problems caused by the new curriculum is that freshman students have to tackle with ill-defined and open-ended problems. Most of freshman students at KIT have never had chance to design and build anything, because the Japanese high school educational system emphasizes knowledge acquisition and memorization with little consideration for open-ended problem solving. Therefore, an introductory design project, which is to be completed at the beginning of EDI, has been introduced before tackling with an ill-defined and open-ended problem.

The paper presents an overview and lessons learned from the introductory design project in Engineering Design Course, which may be illuminating to engineering educators. We discuss how the introductory design project helped the freshman students to tackle with design problems while working as a team.

2. Outline of Engineering Design Education at KIT

“Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Furukawa, T., & Matsumoto, S., & Takemata, K., & Matsuishi, M. (2002, June), Introductory Design Project In Engineering Design Course To Freshmen At Kanazawa Institute Of Technology Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11120