Abstract:

Background:
Recently, firms and enterprises in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field demand human resources with soft skills. One solution in higher education could be a graduation exhibition in which students demonstrate their deliverables to both professors and the public. Through this opportunity, students can communicate with people in normal terms and can respond flexibly to unexpected audience questions and reactions, which are unrealizable in traditional in-school presentations. As a result, it is expected that students can improve the quality of their graduation work, increase their motivation, and acquire soft skills by pursuing research work with an awareness of ordinary people. This would also have a positive effect on their job hunting.
With this in mind, the authors’ research groups in the Department of Computer and Information Engineering at a technical university implemented a graduation exhibition in 2015.

Goal of this Study:
The goal of this study was to investigate the following research questions.
• What did the students learn from the graduation exhibition?
• How did the students value the graduation exhibition?

Implementation of the exhibition:
The graduation exhibition was held at the Kasukabe Convention Hall in the Eastern Saitama Regional Development Center from March 2 to 4, 2015. The exhibition took place in the entrance to the hall. No admission fee was required to view the exhibition. The 15 projects were exhibited on unified-sized tables.

Educational value of the exhibition:
Research methods:
The authors investigated what students learned from the exhibition and how the exhibition was valued by the students. Twelve of the 25 students were selected for the interviews. We chose “case-code matrix,” which is a qualitative data analysis method. This method can find general patterns of a case with full consideration of individuality and materiality.

Results:
The analysis generated seven codes below.
(1) Importance of conversation with visitors
(2) Differences with graduation presentation
(3) Difficulty in explanation and word choice
(4) Importance of time management
(5) Reflection on the quality of graduation work
(6) Improving the work
(7) Significance of working in a group

Discussion:
As a result, it was found that the students valued the interaction with visitors and also revised and improved their graduation work, reflected upon their research, learned schedule planning, and found value in collaborative group work. These elements are heavily involved in communication, presentation, and management, which are related to soft skills. Thus, the exhibition is considered a good opportunity for students to improve their soft skills.

Conclusion:
In this study, the authors investigated what students learned from a graduation exhibition implemented by two research groups in the Computer and Information Engineering department at a technical university. Focused group interviews were chosen as the research method, and a “case-code matrix” was used for analysis. As a result, seven types of codes that indicated the educational value of this program were generated. However, the authors noted that each code is not always mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. In addition, other research methods and analysis methods are required for further study to investigate the educational value of the graduation exhibition from different perspectives.

Keywords:

Higher education, computer science education, soft skills, graduation exhibition, qualitative data analysis.