ELEMENTS OF CDIO IN GRADUATION RESEARCH PROJECT UNDER UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION

Most Japanese students in Engineering College collect class credits before junior year ends and intensively focus only on the graduation research project in senior year. Each student researches an independent project theme while being aided by a professor. The volume and level of a graduation thesis is less than those of a master’s or doctoral thesis. However, it is sure to originally include the essential elements of “conceive”, “design”, and “implement.” This paper records students’ and working professionals’ (company employees’) participation in a university-industry collaboration system as graduation research project. The observations were made when the authors of the paper worked in the laboratory of one such participating university. In particular, our observations showed that such participation had a positive effect on the skills and basic knowledge of working professionals attending university lectures as part of their company’s project participation, allowing them to learn alongside students in university. The several-time classes aided them in improving their skills and basic knowledge and enabled them to keep up with scientific and technological advancements. Moreover, this paper applies a CDIO based perspective to university-industry collaboration projects to demonstrate how the element of “operate” plays an important role in such projects by allowing participants to consider the practical and applicatory aspects of the research results.