Learning through experience ∼ hands-on education at a technical college in Japan ∼

The technical college system is thought to be one of the most successful educational systems in Japan. One of the main reasons for this success is the hands-on education which the technical colleges have given to their students. In this paper, the authors present an outline of the hands-on education at Kanazawa Technical College, a private technical college in Japan. The most important classes for hands-on education at KTC are the “Creative Experiments” and “Capstone Project” classes. The curriculum of KTC is designed to be centered on those hands-on classes. Additionally, the students are encouraged to join extra-curricular projects such as the Robot Contest. Highly-motivated KTC students are joining those projects and are developing their skills and abilities. Four major features of the hands-on education at KTC are: focusing on creativity, emphasizing teamwork, employing kenkyu-sitsu system, and joining external contests. The authors believe that those features will help the graduates be creative engineers throughout their professional life. Despite the contribution of hands-on education towards producing creative engineers, there are many challenges that practitioners face. Among them are legal restrictions, shortage of resources, difficulty in evaluation, and collapse of the life-long employment system. To some extent, those features and challenges are common among technical colleges in Japan.