Abstract:

When discussing reforms of education programs, only official education curriculum is normally focused. However, the author believes that attentions should be paid also for out-of-curriculum or extra-curriculum activities.

The out-of-curriculum project team “Rika-Kobo”, organized by undergraduate students, has been actively involved in various science communication activities in local community over 15 years. The activities of the project team are very similar to Project-Based-Learning (PBL) style activities, but performed and managed in out-of-curriculum basis. This means that the student members are not extrinsically motivated, but instead voluntarily involved in the activities. As a result, they are likely to have the same level of motivations and enthusiasms, leading to generally high qualities in the activities.

Their activities originally aim to stimulate interests of children and other generations into various fields of sciences and technologies. However, upon reviewing the student members’ behaviors in the activities, certain educational effects for them seem to be realized. This is because, in actual scenes of their activities, the student members are likely to notice that they need to obtain and/or further establish their knowledge in several related fields of sciences and technologies in order to provide better and more understandable explanations and performances towards audiences in wide ranges of generations from children to elderlies. Once they realize such situations, they are likely to study on their own. When doing so, they do not have to be worried about GPA scores and/or exam evaluations, resulting in internally motivated STEM learning atmospheres.

In this paper, the activities of this out-of-curriculum project team will be described, and motivations of the student members will be discussed based on results of questionnaires and interviews.

Keywords:

PBL, extra-curriculum, out-of-curriculum, student project, science communication.