This study aimed to experimentally assess the sensibility of thumbnails on online video-sharing services for tourism targeting elderly people. A total of 100 males and females aged 60 and above participated in the experiment. There were 29 male participants: 1 in his 60s, 18 in their 70s, and 10 in their 80s. Of the 71 female participants, 19 were in their 60s, 43 in their 70s, and 9 in their 80s. This experiment was conducted at a welfare exchange center located in Saitama Prefecture. Four thumbnails with varying font types, font color, font sizes, and image edging were created and used in various conditions. The assessment included 11 items measuring the participants' sensibility evaluation and 2 items measuring their comprehensive evaluation of thumbnails. Four types of experimental thumbnail conditions were prepared and randomly presented to the participants. In each condition, participants viewed thumbnails (10 seconds), answered measurement items (1 minute 30 seconds), and took a break (20 minutes). The main factors influencing sensibility evaluation were derived by conducting a factor analysis using principal axis factoring and varimax rotation on the results obtained from the experiment. Factor 1 included positive keywords such as "Enjoyable" and "Exciting." Therefore, factor 1 was named "Curiosity." Factor 2 included negative keywords such as "Unpleasant" and "Boring." Therefore, factor 2 was named "Disgust." Furthermore, in analyses using factor scores, participants' sensitivity evaluation of thumbnails was influenced by gender. Therefore, it is important to consider gender differences when designing thumbnails based on sensitivity evaluations.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has restricted the movement of people globally and has had a negative economic impact on many industries, such as the restaurant and tourism industries. However, the expansion of the concept of “living with COVID-19” is increasing the number of visitors to restaurants and tourist facilities. The purpose of this study is to derive the tourist awareness factors that attract customers to tourist facilities. This study focused on ski resorts as one of the tourist facilities. The primary awareness factors were investigated using a survey. The factor analysis revealed that tourists outside the prefecture with high anxiety levels concerning COVID-19 showed negative awareness of infection control measures, such as “Social Distancing,” “Disinfection,” and “Ventilation” in ski resorts.

In the era of industry 4.0, procurement in supply chain management is the key to developing information management systems. It directly affects production planning failure. In this case, it is the process to prepare and confirming the material inventory is in the ordinal stages and be able to produce the products in any production line. In terms of industrial informatics, it can provide information management approaches for leveraging data sharing between factories. The multiobjective optimization will be enabled by integrating material inventory, production planning and monitoring, and transportation planning collaboration. The material-inventory transportation problem is the virtual factory situation when production plan failure occurs. It becomes the cost to transport material between each factory and the distribution to clients. In this study, the question of the material-inventory transportation problem is: How can we transport other materials from one factory into another factory? This study proposed a model to find out about the adjustment of material inventory through transportation. The objective of this model is to minimize the whole production cost and total transportation cost.

In this study, we carried out an online survey of 225 faculty members of various higher education institutions across Japan to know how active learning courses were implemented and operated during the academic year (AY) 2020-2021. The result of the survey showed that (1) implementation and operation of active learning courses are done differently in each academic discipline, (2) overall situation during AY 2020-2021 is returning to its original state prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, and (3) most respondents suggested that 30%-50% of a single class can be done online. Additionally, there have been many cases reported where active learning courses were not implemented, operated, and managed because of the pandemic. It has also been found that teachers had difficulties in managing and grading the active learning courses themselves.

The computer programming education at elementary schools is implemented in Japan from 2020. However, there is not enough human resource for it. As society becomes more IT-oriented, retirees with computer programming experience and seniors who are eager to learn programming are increasing in the local community. We have been working on finding such people and supporting computer programming education at local elementary schools. Then seniors with support by students had programming classes at four local elementary schools. This paper introduces the outline of this initiative. Then we analyze how the activity was accepted by children and teachers. Also we describe how the seniors’ intellectual needs and willingness to contribute to the local society was fulfilled, and how it affected for seniors and students each other.

In this study, we report the curriculum of a programming course case study of senior citizens jointly implemented by the university and a local government in Japan. The objective of the course is to offer lifelong learning opportunities for retired seniors. The program also offers them necessary skills for impacting programming education in the local elementary schools. Through a questionnaire, we design the course by collecting the opinions of the participants to understand the manner in which the participants developed human relations and learning for one year. The research objectives are to study the learnability of the programming course and the course operation among differently aged participants. Through qualitative analysis, we observed distinct characteristics of senior learners with respect to their diversities in terms of motivation, background knowledge, and skills. The second course was taught by senior lecturers who had previously attended the course and the learnability of the second course was better than the previous one. With respect to the instructional design for senior citizens, scheduling, pacing, and diverse learning styles were observed to be the key.

“Programming education,” which aims to nurture pupils’ logical thinking skills through e.g. computer programming, will be compulsory from 2020 in elementary schools in Japan. However, many schools and teachers are not fully ready. In this article authors developed and ran a short computer programming course for elementary school teachers and studied how attendees changed their awareness of programming education. The result showed that the course improved their understanding of the programming education and its teaching method and confidence in teaching programming to some extent. However, their confidence in teaching programming was relatively lower than other elements. Attendees with programming experience showed higher self-esteem, which implied that adding one’s programming experience would increase one’s skills. Practical-minded understanding of programming was more contributive to increase confidence in teaching programming than conceptual understanding of programming.

New regional challenges have arisen in modern Japan such as a fading sense of community and social isolation. To challenge these, we will launch a welfare design lab where professors and students will work together with community residents to identify and solve regional challenges through design-based welfare engineering expertise. This work-in-progress paper introduces our current interests and approach to the project.

In Japan, after a period of rapid economic growth, the migration of the central city population to the suburbs has caused issues related to the decentralization of urban functions and the hollowing out of the central city area. The “Basic Policy and Action Plan for Revitalization” created a compact city that provides a range of functions necessary to facilitate living in the central urban area. A compact city needs to have commerce, government, welfare, hospitals, and transportation. Previous studies have reported that people move closer to hospitals when they relocate from the suburbs to the city center. The reasons for this tendency include “hospital convenience” and “emergency response.” However, a specific investigation has not been conducted. The purpose of this study is to extract the main factors influencing outpatients’ expectations of and satisfaction with hospital care in order to identify and effectively operate a hospital suitable for a compact city. The main factors of patients’ expectations and satisfaction were investigated using a questionnaire survey. A factor analysis revealed that outpatients living near clinics show expectation and satisfaction in “reception.”

In this study, we report the curriculum of a programming course case study of senior citizens jointly implemented by the university and a local government in Japan. The objective of the course is to offer high-quality lifelong learning opportunities for retired seniors. The program also offers them necessary skills for impacting programming education in the local elementary schools, and the participatory action research (PAR) was adopted as a research method. Through a questionnaire and participant observation, we design the course by collecting the opinions of a lecturer or assistant to understand the manner in which the participants developed human relations and learning for one year. The research objectives are to study the learnability of the programming course and the course operation among differently aged participants. Through qualitative analysis, we observed distinct characteristics of senior learners with respect to their diversities in terms of motivation, background knowledge, and skills. The second course was taught by senior lecturers who had previously attended the course and the learnability of the second course was better than the previous one. With respect to the instructional design for senior citizens, scheduling, pacing, and diverse learning styles were observed to be the key. For future study, we attempt to address the conflicts among members and guarantee the quality of education for senior lecturers to support the teaching of programming in elementary schools. This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18K02828.

In this study, the authors produced self-instructional video materials for a first-year programming course based on two methods; the first method was a monologue-based captured slideshow presentation, whereas the other method was a dialogue-based video involving two puppets. We created ten videos for each of these methods and used these videos in the course to examine the manners of students who watched them and whether the trend of watching varied according to their academic performance level. The results denoted that the audience rate of the slideshow presentation video gradually increased as the lessons continued, whereas that of the videos involving puppets exhibited the opposite trend. The questionnaires that were collected from the students indicated that they watched the videos involving puppets, especially in the beginning. Thus, the videos involving puppets exhibited efficacy, especially for beginners. Meanwhile, the slideshow video was effective for (re)confirming the important points.

This paper proposes a new cooperative association between special needs schools, technical high schools, and institutes of technology through the development of an application. The authors organized various classes over a one-year period in upper secondary schools and universities to enable high school students and undergraduates to collaborate toward a shared goal. The analysis of reports written by participating students revealed the educational effectiveness of the program in learning pertaining to realistic problem solving. With an eye to the future, tasks such as effective schedule coordination among the three parties, the development of a travel budget for students, and better technical assistance from undergraduates to high school students need to be undertaken and the issues therein must be addressed.

This paper describes the challenges of social implementation education to a special needs education school and reports a new collaboration practice to address them. We have conducted social implementation education to a nearby special needs education school for five years, in which students develop and improve digital teaching materials based on the requirements of the school’ s teachers. In this education activity, we faced three challenges in terms of social implementation education; difficulty of problem/need finding, ensuring the continuous and proper collaboration, and diffusion of development results. We took a new collaboration with a regional research community of special needs education school’ s teachers. The collaboration activities for two years made it clear that this collaboration is very useful for addressing the challenges.

“Programming education” will be compulsory in Japanese elementary schools beginning in 2020. However, implementation barriers include underusing information and communication technology (ICT) and overextended teachers. Here, we analyzed the current status of programming education in elementary schools and evaluated teachers' opinions on the subject. Information was collected by in-person questionnaires from in-service teachers at eight schools. The results showed that teachers generally underuse computers in teaching, which defeats the purpose of requiring programming education. Moreover, many teachers lack programming experience and are not experienced or confident in teaching programming, which could impede the implementation of programming education by the target date. These findings emphasize the need for teacher training to prepare them to provide effective programming education.

In project-based learning, student projects benefit when they include the analysis and assessment of risk. However, students lack experience in risk assessment, which limits their ability to carry out this aspect of the work. In practice, the instructor often advises students to assess the risks because this would be a key feature of a professional project. But because of their inexperience, they are unable to assess risk properly. Failure mode and effects analysis ( FMEA) has been used in project risk management. There is also a 'fuzzy' version of FMEA. It uses the fuzzy inference system to eliminate some of limitations of traditional FMEA. Fuzzy FMEA works better than the standard version when professionals undertake projects; however, it is not so easy for students to apply it perfectly because the risk priority number ( RPN) in FMEA is subjectively weighed by experts. Expert opinion is required to 'score' each failure mode that may occur. Students lack the necessary experience to perform the 'scoring', and thus provide valid inputs to the system that provides the analysis and decisions about risk factors. In this study, a model is proposed for improving the fuzzy FMEA method so that it will provide better support for students as they identify and assess risks in their projects. We use two major approaches: 1) the membership function is constructed by agents. Expert opinions are simulated to help students gain a better appreciation of the concept of project risk and 2) fuzzy rule-based classification is developed by voting techniques to provide the values in the fuzzy rules table. It will be used to judge the risks using a fuzzy inference system. We illustrate the use of the proposed methods for supporting risk assessment by describing how they are applied during a student project.

Project-based learning has been in widespread use in education. However, project managers are unaware of the students’ lack of experience and treat them as if they were professional staff. This paper proposes the application of a fuzzy failure mode and effects analysis model for project-based software engineering education. This method integrates the fuzzy rule-based system with learning agents. The agents construct the membership function from historical data. Data are processed by a clustering process that facilitates the construction of the membership function. It helps students who lack experience in risk assessment to develop their expertise in that skill. The paper also suggests a classification technique for a fuzzy rule-based system that can be used to judge risk based on a fuzzy inference system. The student project will thus be further enhanced with respect to risk assessment. We then discuss the design of experiments to verify the proposed model.

In learning and development, students need to be made aware of their slips and mistakes in terms of acquiring the required knowledge, skills and competencies, especially, in active learning approaches. However, assessments may not necessarily lead to an effective understanding of student's errors. Most assessors are required to measure the extent of student's accurate output in terms of exam answers or practical assessments. Areas of failure tend to be overlooked and for this reason, learners at-risk of achieving poor results can become careless when completing assessments. In the present study, we examine the following research questions: (i) How can we simulate the landscape of data on both individual and team behaviour in terms of failure in their projects? (ii) How can we develop ways of identifying at-risk students in each team and support them immediately? Therefore, in order to address this problem, this research proposes an agent-based simulation of student projects, which considers both individual and team errors. This model is created on the basis of particular characteristics of individual learners within the team. We assume that individuals working within a team are subject to recognition-primed decision making when confronted with particular problems to solve. The adjustment proposed by this model includes analysing the problem using prior knowledge and planning as well as judgements on the suitability of particular solutions. This research will be further developed to identify at-risk learners in terms of investigating the areas they want to develop to achieve their learning goals in particular subjects and especially in the software development fields.