Implementation of Themes for Subject of Manufacturing Basic for First-year Students to Select Major Course
2023-09-13, 11:30– (Asia/Tokyo), 4F Mid-size Conference Room

At the National Institute of Technology, Nagano College, from the fiscal year 2022, all first-year students enter the engineering department without choosing a major. The students will choose to major in one course out of Informatics and Electronics, Mechanics and Robotics, or Civil Engineering when they advance to the second grade. To provide an opportunity for students to select a major, these general subjects are provided - basic manufacturing engineering and basic manufacturing experiments. These subjects are provided based on the five original fields the school offered. We hope students will be motivated to select a major and increase their motivation for future study through these subjects. Each of these two subjects is arranged for 90 minutes, which totals 180 minutes per week. Each of the original fields will be covered for 3 weeks in the first semester and 3 weeks in the second semester, for a total of 6 weeks. The course of Informatics and Electronics(IE) consists of the former “Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering” and “Department of Electronics and Computer Science”. The course of IE consists of the information and the electronics field. We examined the themes and content for the first three weeks and the second three weeks, for six weeks. Three themes were set: machine learning, information security, and application development. In the theme of machine learning, students will study image recognition and image generation, focused on machine learning such as AI and deep learning. In addition, we hope it will lead to a new curriculum on data science that will be established for all departments. In the theme of information security, students learn about the properties of files handled by computers and the information contained in files, focusing on image files mainly. Security is an issue in the information society, and security engineers are required. We believe this will lead to security-related subjects being offered in the following year’s curriculum. In the theme of application development, students will have experience programming a smartphone application. Students are familiar with smartphones and interested in programming through games, etc. In addition, our curriculum has many opportunities for programming as well. By using a tablet, we hope students can experience manufacturing through programming. In this paper, we show the results of implementing these themes, we have discussions based on the state of classes and the results of questionnaires.


At the National Institute of Technology, Nagano College, from the fiscal year 2022, all first-year students enter the engineering department without majoring in courses. The students will major in one course when they advance to the second grade. We have subjects that serve as an opportunity to help them decide on the course they will major in and to increase motivation for future learning. Therefore, as a theme for promoting the information field in the course of Information Electronics, we implemented three themes: machine learning, information security, and application development. In this paper, we will introduce the content and results of these themes.


Keywords

Freshman Education, Machine Learning, Information Security, Application Development

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