KIT is a place where students challenge themselves to develop technology that is useful for society by understanding others' standpoints, collaborating, and testing their ingenuity. Its most characteristic feature is project-based practical education, referred to as "Project design education." This type of education allows students to identify problems of social value and explore measures to solve them.
Now that science and technology have become diversified, and it is difficult to predict what will happen in the future, there is a demand for personnel with a talent for "technical innovation" that will enable Japan to continue to develop as a world leader in science and technology.
In response to this societal demand, KIT provides education based on our policies of "Ideal character building," "Further technical innovation," and "Superb academic-industrial cooperation" to produce engineers who have strength both as human beings and as innovators, and who will think and act for themselves.
We incorporate "Intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and intercultural co-creation education" into our lessons, projects, and research, which involve researchers, engineers, residents, and people from other countries.
Students study, research, and carry out their projects with people of different generations, fields, and cultures. They gain the following advantages:
- The research skills to take on the challenges of the future.
- A combination of academic skills and human strength creates overall competence.
- Readiness for a globalized society.
KIT features Project Design education, in which students identify and solve problems in teams. In 2011, we became the first Japanese university to join the CDIO Initiative (Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate). It is the universal standard for engineering education and is adhered to by more than 130 organizations in 36 countries, including MIT and Stanford University.
Students are requested to find what users need and to embody their solution as a prototype. Through experiments, validation, and evaluation, they acquire the "innovation skills" required of personnel who will play an essential role in a global society.
In 2016, we launched an e-syllabus to combine more than 100 extracurricular projects and the regular curriculum to build overall competence. In April 2017, our new "Yume-kobo" building, which houses a workshop with various equipment types and a spacious work area for embodying ideas, was opened. We are promoting CDIO in both our regular curriculum and our extracurricular activities.
KIT was the first Japanese university to introduce IBM Watson, an AI-assisted education service. An academic adviser with artificial intelligence referred to as "KIT COG," searches over one million items in KIT graduates' archival records to select a student with a similar academic background and give appropriate advice to the student based on the data taken from the record. It is possible to provide students with timely advice concerning their curriculum and extracurricular activity choices.
Active learning is becoming increasingly popular. Finding out the opinions and ideas of different types of people is fundamental to the creation of innovation.
KIT's co-creation education involves promoting intergenerational communication with engineers and researchers, interdisciplinary communication with people in different fields, and intercultural communication with people from abroad, including international students, to cultivate a multifaceted viewpoint and create innovation.
KIT emphasizes the fundamental idea that teaching is learning, derived from the Chinese "Book of Rites." To teach someone, one must have several times more knowledge than the learner to teach in a way that is easy to understand. Teaching is the best way to deepen one's learning.
KIT's students are taught so that they gain the ability to teach what they have learned. Active learning that involves students teaching each other has been incorporated into all subjects since 2016. Students teach their areas of expertise to each other in self-learning sessions at "learning squares" located all over the campus, which are available for use at night and in the daytime.
At KIT, we believe it is through the integration of various scientific disciplines that we can achieve the innovations to transform the way we lead our lives in the future. Such innovations can only emerge once we have truly understood and reflected on the fundamentals of our scientific traditions.
KIT has collected 2,000 seminal works of scientific inquiry in their original editions. Education and research using original editions will start at Challenge Labo. Galileo looked up at the sky and asked himself, "Why don't the stars fall from the heavens?" Reflecting on such fundamental questions led him to design and manufacture the first telescope to observe the sky.
