Abstract:

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 “KTC”), 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 our educational experiences, it can be said that the factors in degrading the level of students’ works 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.

Text and encoded information can be easily transmitted even between different linguistic areas, but sense-related conditions are difficult to convey. As society is being globalized, the necessity to convey sense-related conditions is growing. In order to convey more sense-related conditions, it is effective to “move illustrations.” Accordingly, in the educational program, students utilize animation as a “communication tool,” and learn how to clearly express the intentions of producers and design animations. In addition, animation methods are limited, and students are instructed to put together things in an organized manner under some constraints. This education program was offered to the first to third-year students of KTC, and this paper reports on the results of the implementation of the program.

Keywords:

Animation, Engineering Design, Active Learning.