Curriculum design for engineering education on embedded system based on broad partnership with university, corporation and local school

This paper describes an educational achievement in embedded system field from the academic year 2010 to 2011 in a national college of technology called “KOSEN.” We the authors have been continuing specialized education in the field of the embedded system in order to let students be work-ready engineers in various industrial fields. However, it is recently getting harder and harder for students to imagine their future vision as engineers and to excite their spontaneous motivation to learn. One reason is the fact that it is difficult for students to imagine relationship between final embedded-products and elementary contents of lectures that they study in the college. Furthermore, recent embedded systems are too complex to put the whole picture together. To cope with these problems, we have achieved the following four activities for improvement of our curriculum: 1) Maturing educational partnership with local schools through open-lectures to provide early education to pupils who will be our students in future; 2) Developing a multiplicity-carrying microprocessor board as a new teaching material with its online manual and software libraries; 3) Carrying out several special lectures and meetings which are held for various stages of students in order to provide opportunities for them to become interested in the actual industrial fields; 4) Incorporating a lecture on model-based embedded-product design for advanced course students. Through these activities for improvement of our curriculum, we had provided diverse opportunities to students. We verified the effectiveness of our activities by using questionnaires, and then more than 80% of students affirmed the effectiveness.