Competency and PBL Education
The School aims to educate information architects and monozukuri (products) architects. A high level of competency will be required of those at the architect level. The School has organized these into Three Meta Competencies, with Seven Core Competencies for the Master Program of Information Systems Architecture and Five Core Competencies for the Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering. The entire curriculum is structured so that these competencies will be enhanced throughout the two years of education. Each competency is as follows:
- Communication skills
- Skills in continuous learning and research
- Team activities
- Ability to generate innovative concepts and ideas
- Social and market oriented viewpoints
- Ability to analyze needs
- Modeling and system proposal
- Management skills
- Negotiation skills
- Documentation skills
- Ability to generate (plan ideas, actualization ideas, originality)
- Ability to express (requirement definition skills, proposal skills, visualization skills)
- Design skills (functional design skills, sensual design skills, skills to integrate function and sensuality)
- Development skills (development preparation skills, implementation skills, tests, problem solving skills)
- Ability to analyze (data analysis skills, usability assessment skills, market research skills)
To acquire these competencies in a practical manner, this school utilizes Project Based Learning (PBL). With the students cooperating to achieve a clear goal to complete a project, the students will have the opportunity to acquire practical skills and knowhow useful in the IT and monozukuri (production) industry. Some of the themes taken up in the 2007 school year were Business Process Reengineering Proposal for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Bureau of Port and Harbor, Project to Establish an Information Security Policy at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (AIIT) and others. Selecting themes that are realistic and not just desk theories are the feature of this program. Moreover, at this school, the students are put into groups of about five, with each group having three instructors to provide thorough guidance.
■PBL Theme List for School Year 2009 (Master Program of Information Systems Architecture)
| No． | Theme |
|---|---|
| 1 | R&D for Next Generation Mobile Network Services |
| 2 | Software Development Environment R&D and the Development Process |
| 3 | Software Development Process and Management |
| 4 | Internet Service Plan: Software Planning and Basic Design |
| 5 | Development of Systems (Web Applications, etc.) using Open Source Software |
| 6 | Video Stream Mining for a Context Awareness Service |
| 7 | Understanding and Acquisition of Upstream Process Methodology Focused on Conceptual Data Modeling |
| 8 | Establishment of Information Strategy and Basic Plans for Systemization |
| 9 | Development of Privacy Impact Assessment Guidelines and their Application Assessment in Public Systems |
| 10 | Implementation of Project Management in a SCM System Establishment Project |
■PBL Theme List for School Year 2009 (Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering)
| No． | Contents |
|---|---|
| 1 | Service Design by Simulation |
| 2 | Innovative R&D to Establish Safety and Assurance |
| 3 | Development of Monozukuri (product) for Small and Medium Sized Urban Manufacturing Industries |
| 4 | Proposal and Development of New Products in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment |
| 5 | Study of Mobility in Urban Areas |
| 6 | Proposal and Development of Micro Products using Micro Vibration |
| 7 | Design and Development of High Level Activity Support Technology for Human Beings |
| 8 | Metropolis Movement Design, 2025 |
| 9 | Development of Products that Orchestrate Healing |
| 10 | Innovative Use of Urban Space |