Abstract:

This study discusses a preliminary education program that should be run before the adoption of Project Based Learning (PBL). The program “will enable leaners to seamlessly work on more advanced PBL processes afterward” in higher education. Educators can take a variety of approaches to creative education using PBL according to the grade of learners by setting a subject to cover in class as a “familiar issue,” an “issue that the local community is facing,” an “issue to tackle in collaboration with companies,” or the like. Many universities and high schools in Japan have adopted PBL in the first-year education (designed for freshmen) as a teaching tool that focuses on “group activities” with the aim of honing learners’ generic skills required to possess for working in society. These facts have suggested that PBL is one of the most effective education methods for learning through finding and solving problems in higher education.

In this paper we describe the preliminary education program based on a Short-term design project employed before the adoption of the PBL process so that learners can smoothly carry out PBL exercise through group activities. Our practical experience of education has shown that the group activity-based PBL process requires the ability to express one’s own ideas to others (communication skill), the ability to address problem / issue with customer orientation (design thinking skill), and the ability to move ahead with tasks in a planned manner (skill to see the big picture of matters). Therefore, we gave our attention to design project as an activity that will sharpen these three skills and that lets a student complete assignments by himself or herself. This paper reports on classroom exercise into which design project activities were incorporated. According to a questionnaire survey conducted after the class, our education program received positive feedback from the students who took the course.

Keywords:

Design Thinking, Engineering Design, Active Learning.