Effects on engineering education of group learning

In engineering education, self-development ability is very important. It is said that to cultivate the ability, group learning is very effective. The group learning is to form groups with several students and to assign projects to the groups. However, simply dividing students into groups and giving assignment are not enough to obtain good educational effect. Besides giving assignments to students groups, several tips are required to obtain good educational effects. The author practiced the group learning in two engineering courses, those are ”General Engineering” in Department of Systems Engineering, Okayama University from 2002 to 2008 and ”Introduction to Information Processing” for engineering undergraduates of Okayama University from 2010 to 2014. In the courses, students in the group are to be assigned investigation subjects, then, investigate the subject, make a Power Point and present the investigated subject using the Power Point file. The author devised in several tips and received several awards on education for the group learning practices. This report gives details of the tips devised and the effects of the group learning.