Pradeep Kashinath Waychal, Katsuyuki Ohsawa, Masashi Miura, Ayano Ohsaki
ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings 122nd ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Making Value for Society(122nd ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Making Value for Society) 2015年 査読有り
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2015. Engineering is a fast-growing profession and is increasingly cutting across boundaries of disciplines, countries, and cultures and engineering education has to prepare students for these scenarios. Towards that, we organized an Indo Japanese program involving two student projects. The students and projects were from different engineering and non-engineering disciplines. This paper presents one of them - a water rocket project. Both the teams worked together for about four months and had enriching experience. The project had three parts: fabrication of water rockets, design and development of sensor systems, and analysis of the launches. Both the teams worked collaboratively on the activities. Initially, the teams worked from their respective locations and towards the end of the project, the Japanese team visited India for a week to fabricate water rockets, test sensor systems, and carry out and analyze actual launches. While the participants cherished this inter-cultural experience and gave a satisfaction rating of 4.82 on the 5 point Likert scale, they felt that they should have spent more time preparing for the visit, for learning the other language and establishing better communication with their counterparts. Even though the water rocket was a novel idea and resulted in substantial technical learning, the cultural learning was more significant. It may be due to the project's shorter duration and the significant divergence between the two cultures at syntactical levels.