TRIZ Paper: Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010


Education with TRIZ: For New Perspectives
Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin University)
A Special Interest Lecture presented at
The Sixth TRIZ Symposium in Japan,
Held by Japan TRIZ Society on Sept. 9-11, 2010 at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Atsugi, Kanagawa, Japan
[Posted on Dec. 30, 2010]   Updated: Sept. 25, 2011

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Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Dec. 25, 2010)

At the 6th TRIZ Symposium in Japan, 2010 , I gave a Special Interest Lecture, i.e. an Invited Lecture, with the title of "Education with TRIZ: For New Perspectives".  I have just written an introduction to it as a part of my "Personal Report of Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010"  and am going to post it the TRIZ Forum section of this Web site. 

PDF files of my presentation slides were posted (on Dec. 1, 2010) in the Official Web site of Japan TRIZ Society   .  For the purpose of easier access to and repository of my presentation, the original presentation and my introduction in the Personl Report are posted in this page.  


[1] Abstract

Education with TRIZ: For New Perspectives

Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin University)

The 6th Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010
Held by Japan TRIZ Society on Sept. 9-11, 2010
at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Atsugi, Kanagawa, Japan

Abstract

TRIZ, a methodology of creative problem solving, has been promoted in Japan mainly in the field of technology and towards industrial engineers. It should be necessary and useful, however, to enhance its promotion in the field of education both in higher education and middle and primary education. For this purpose Japan TRIZ Society has recently started the "Education with TRIZ" Study Group. In the present paper I would like to overview different approaches/experiences done by people in Japan and overseas, including by myself, and make new perspectives for the future.

The first main field is the education and research of/with TRIZ in the universities and graduate schools. It is necessary not only to teach knowledge and techniques of TRIZ, but also to cultivate capabilities of creative problem solving, of comprehension of overall process of developing technologies and products, and of handling large, complex problems. The research and further development of the TRIZ methodology is also needed.

The second main field is the introduction of creative thinking way of TRIZ into secondary and primary education. In this case, it is essential to choose suitable contents and styles of teaching depending on the interest and maturity of the pupils. Attracting their interest is most important, and hence we need to choose proper topics and materials. Since classes for children have been developed and carried out in Russia etc., we would like to learn such experiences. Concerning to the education with TRIZ, it should be effective and helpful for us to go out and learn from various people working for education of creative thinking outside TRIZ.


[2]  Presentation Slides in PDF

Presentation Slides in English in PDF (43 slides, 437 KB)

Presentation Slides in Japanese in PDF (43 slides, 540 KB)


[3] Introduction:

Excerpt from:

Personal Report of
The Sixth TRIZ Symposium in Japan, 2010
Part F. Usage of TRIZ in Education and in Academia

Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin University)
Dec. 25, 2010 (Posted on Dec. 30, 2010)

 

Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin Univ.) [JI08, L-3] gave a Special Interest Lecture, i.e. an Invited Lecture, with the title of "Education with TRIZ: For New Perspectives".  I would like to quote my Abstract here first:

TRIZ, a methodology of creative problem solving, has been promoted in Japan mainly in the field of technology and towards industrial engineers. It should be necessary and useful, however, to enhance its promotion in the field of education both in higher education and middle and primary education. For this purpose Japan TRIZ Society has recently started the "Education with TRIZ" Study Group. In the present paper I would like to overview different approaches/experiences done by people in Japan and overseas, including by myself, and make new perspectives for the future.

The first main field is the education and research of/with TRIZ in the universities and graduate schools. It is necessary not only to teach knowledge and techniques of TRIZ, but also to cultivate capabilities of creative problem solving, of comprehension of overall process of developing technologies and products, and of handling large, complex problems. The research and further development of the TRIZ methodology is also needed.

The second main field is the introduction of creative thinking way of TRIZ into secondary and primary education. In this case, it is essential to choose suitable contents and styles of teaching depending on the interest and maturity of the pupils. Attracting their interest is most important, and hence we need to choose proper topics and materials. Since classes for children have been developed and carried out in Russia etc., we would like to learn such experiences. Concerning to the education with TRIZ, it should be effective and helpful for us to go out and learn from various people working for education of creative thinking outside TRIZ.

As the background of this lecture, I first showed the current distribution of universities and schools more or less involved in TRIZ in Japan (slide (right)).  Red circles represents organizations or individuals working as JTS members, while light-blue circles those working as non-members of JTS.  Larger circles mean that there are at least one full-time teacher, while smaller circles a part-time teacher or an individual.  Thus full-time JTS-member teachers (i.e., big red circles) are working at Kushiro National College of Tech., Miyagi TRIZ Study Group, Waseda Univ., SANNO Inst. of Management, Tokyo Metropolitan Univ., Kanagawa Inst. of Tech., Niigata Univ., and Osaka Gakuin Univ.  There are 6 big light-blue circles. 

As I wrote in the Abstract, our first target of TRIZ-based education is the universities and graduate schools (slide (below-left)).  It is important for us to understand that the education of (undergraduate) students is/should be much different from the training of engineers in industries, mostly because of the difference in their background knowledge and interest.  Before teaching TRIZ we need to cultivate students' background ability, and we should combine TRIZ with the specialty education in each department.  As shown in the slide (below-right), there are various alternatives in designing the (TRIZ-based) courses in universities.  Number of lectures (i.e., total length of time) and position in the curriculum must be officially decided in the department; this means that a teacher who wants to introduce any TRIZ education has to build up his/her capability first and to fight with and persuade other teachers to squeeze TRIZ education into the tight curriculum.  Then the teacher should choose proper style of teaching and must select and design the contents to teach. 

Before showing various examples of TRIZ education, we should think over the style of education with respect to its function.  The slide (right) is taken from my TRIZ class exercise on 'Functional Analysis of Lecturing' for the purpose to think of better lecture courses.  I request my students to draw the functional relationship of the system of lecturing.  The top diagram is the usual primitive answer by the students.  Then I request them to redraw it in the manner recommended by USIT.  When requested to put the most important object at the top, some students put 'teacher' there (diagram below-left). After some discussion, students agree to put 'students' at the top, and then finally divide the 'students' into 'myself' and 'other students' (diagram below-right).   

The various 'materials' for teaching may be listed up.  And they may be represented by 'Information of the contents of the lecture', where the personal talk by the teacher may be an important component.  The Functional Diagram is thus obtained as shown in the slide (below-left).  Then I pose the students a question 'Something WRONG in this diagram?'.  Now the students understand: In the diagram (below-left) the most important function (or activity) is missing; i.e. the activity of learning and understanding for myself.  The function of learning and understanding is acted mainly by 'myself' and on 'myself'.  -- This is a very clear and convincing presentation of the mechanism of lecturing (or education) written in the form of Functional Diagram in TRIZ (or USIT). 

In my TRIZ class, I go ahead to show the slide (right).  Since the activity of 'Learn and Understand' is mostly mental, we should better show the relationships among actual activities, intellectual activities, and mental activities.  When we, as a student, are attending at a lecture, we do look (or watch), listen, and read as in intellectual activities, and we obtain new information.  However, for understanding the new information properly, we need to have some background knowledge (or understanding as the basis).  By combining with such relevant understanding, the new information can be turned into new understanding. (For this process, we need to ask, inquire, survey, and think and work to understand.)  For making the 'new understanding 'into deeper and solid 'new perception', intellectual activities as shown in the slide may be necessary and useful.  To promote all these mental activities, we, as a learner, need interest, motivation, passion, mind, wish, etc. and also a lot of efforts.  Thus the teacher has to attract and encourage the students to have these mental attitude.  This scheme gives us a good guide to design our courses of TRIZ education.   

With variations in education styles and contents in mind, I would like to introduce you several case studies published so far. 

The slide (right) shows Example A1 which is taken from the TETRIS Project of EU.  This project aims at establishing a TRIZ course at high schools, universities, and industries by the collaboration of more than 10 organizations distributed among several EU countries.  The project made a textbook "TETRIS TRIZ Handbook", which is a nice compilation of Body of Knowledge of Classical TRIZ, and is distributing it in five language versions in CD-R without charge.  This may be regarded as a material for "Lecture to teach TRIZ".  --- But I rather think it necessary for us to adapt our education more to students' background knowledge and interests.

Example A2 (two slides (below)) is Nakagawa's lecture class at Osaka Gakuin Univ.  It is an optional, non-mandatory course for the 2nd year (2nd term) students in Faculty of Informatics.  The theme is "Methodologies of Creative Problem Solving".  The topics of 15 lectures (90 minutes each) are shown in the two slides.  Lectures start with easy introduction of examples and background knowledge, and go on to the methods for analyzing the problems and generating solutions, and wrap up with the explanation of the whole processes of USIT (i.e., a TRIZ-based process easy to learn and apply) and of TRIZ.  The lecture has the skeleton of problem solving process, and contains concepts and methods taken from TRIZ, USIT, and some other relevant methods.  In short, this is a lecture course on Creative Problem Solving having TRIZ/USIT in its core part, but not a course of teaching (Classical) TRIZ.  This is my choice of education at the university level.

In the following two slides (below), four examples are shown on TRIZ-related courses carried out in Japanese universities.  The "Creative Design Exercise Class" (Ex. A3) has been carried out intensively in the Univ. of Tokyo by Professor Masayuki Nakao et al. [*** They published a book on their class in 2008, and I read it recently after the Symposium.  I should have introduced their class in more detail, I regret.]  They use the Function-Behavior-Structure Model as the basis of their design methodology, and teach their own way of solution generation methods which are closely related to Axiomatic Design and partly incorporating TRIZ.  [*** Unfortunately, however, Professor Nakao has been a critique against TRIZ since his experiences of disappointment of Classical TRIZ and TRIZ software tools around 1997-1999.]  They have taught about 130 students every year in Mechanical Engineering of the prestigious University of Tokyo.  Ex. A6 (slide (below-right)) is also an interesting case.  In the students' Formula SAE Project, a student used TRIZ effectively for improving the design of air intake pipe of the combustion engine.  He generated a nice idea by using TRIZ Contradiction Matrix.  Prof. Masao Ishihama says that the student could generated a useful idea partly because of his experiences in machining and capability of CAE software as the background.  It should be noticed that almost all the teachers in these examples (A2 through A6) have experiences of working in industries before becoming university teachers.  [e.g., Nakagawa worked for Fujitsu for 18 years as a researcher and a managing staff.]

In Japanese universities, undergraduate thesis works in TRIZ are rather rare.  Nakagawa's Seminar Class may be such an exceptional case, because TRIZ is the main topic of the lab.  See slide (right).  The Seminar Class has much longer time (90 minutes class every week, for 2 years) of education of/with TRIZ.  Thus if the students already passed the lecture class (as shown in Example A2), they can be trained well in problem solving. [In reality, some of the students came to my seminar class without passing my lecture class in the 2nd year, thus causing difficulties.]  Learning case studies and doing group exercises of problem solving are done in the 3rd year.  Then in the 4th year students do their thesis work.  Even though they work on individual problems, we do group discussions on the problems by turn.  Case studies of solving familiar problems have been accumulated as shown in the slide (right).  It is important for the teachers to brush up students' theses later into good case studies which are useful for many people to learn.

At the level of graduate schools, we should expect two type of TRIZ education/research.  Ex. A8 (slide (below-left)) suggests to apply TRIZ to problem solving in Master or PhD thesis work in various specialty fields.  This must be the main target of introducing TRIZ into academia, just like into industries.  If research leaders are familiar with TRIZ, there must be much opportunities of applying TRIZ to research work of graduate students.  Ex. A9 (side (below-right)) shows the cases of research and development the TRIZ methodology.  There are several research centers of TRIZ in the West, but not so strong yet.  INSA Strasbourg (France) is the only one Graduate Course specialized in TRIZ in the Western countries at moment.

Slide (right) shows a recent case of Nakagawa's Seminar Class for 2nd year students (in the first semester), which may be a model class for younger students, down to 10 years old.  In the Seminar Class, the teacher gives no lecture but facilitates the group exercise.  The task is to survey as wide variety of 'Writing Instruments'  as possible.  The students are encouraged to think of the basic mechanisms/principles of writing, to classify the writing instruments in a hierarchical way with respect to the writing mechanisms.  Then they further go head to think of various usages of writing instruments, to make a hierarchical classification of the usage, and evaluate various use of mechanisms with respect to the needs of use.  All the work is done without using TRIZ terms/tools, but the students gradually understand that the writing instruments have been developed in various ways so as to fulfil different needs of writing/drawing.  Thus the students begin to understand the basic TRIZ concepts of systems, system analysis, evolution of systems, etc.
The second target of TRIZ-based education is the primary and secondary education.  The slide (right) shows the basic points we need to consider. In case of children and high school pupils, it is important to attract their interest and to adapt the teaching contents and methods to their interests and maturity.  The scheme shown in the slide is a simplified version of the mental activities of learning (shown in a previous slide).  We realize that Japanese TRIZ community is quite weak in the experiences of education in this aspects and that we should learn a lot from Russian/Belarussian TRIZ communities and from people working in education in Japan (and other countries). 

Example B1 (slide (below-left)) shows TRIZ-based creativity education for children.  Such education has been developed and carried out actively in Russia, Belarus, etc.  Nikolai Khomenko has been the leader of the Jonathan Livingston Project.  When I made a research trip to Russia and Belarus in 1999, I met several researchers/teachers in such activities.  Natalia Rubina gave me a full set of her hand-made teaching materials of her CID Course for Children.  It is a class of one hour every week for the children from 1st to 3rd year at an elementary school.  The set contains 6 Workbooks for children and 6 Guidebooks for teachers.  The whole set was translated from Russian into English and was posted in my Web site "TRIZ Home Page in Japan" in 2001-2002    .  Though it is difficult for us to think what concepts/methods in TRIZ and how we can/should introduce to children, these materials give us a vivid image of the class.  [*** The meterials were published in chapter by chapter in HTML.  Maybe I should combine them into 12 PDF files for easier printing.]  Ex. B2 (slide (below-right)) describes a trial of creativity education for children of age 10-12.  Harumi Ichikawa made a series of half-day workshops on "Equivalent Transformation (ET)" method.  The ET method was developed by her father, Prof. Kikuya Ichikawa, since 1944 and is one of the most well-known Japanese creativity methods often used in the era of 1960s to 1980s.  ET has a deep insight in the understanding and application of the Four-box Scheme (of using Generalized problem and Generalized solution), and hence is akin to TRIZ (actually there are several TRIZ leaders in Japan who were/are ET practitioners).  The ET workshop experience is encouraging for us to start TRIZ workshops for children.

Slide (right) shows a unique work done by Father and Son(s).  Katsuya Miyanishi is an engineer at an IT company.  His elder son, Taichiro, was a 12-year boy at a junior high school in Kanazawa city when he did his summer homework with the help by his father.  Taichiro wanted to understand "Why water striders can stand and slide on the water".  Father guided Son to consider various ways for water striders to stand and slide on the water surface, and to build toy models.  The work was presented in Japan TRIZ Symposium 2008, as shown in the slide.  The conclusion by Miyanishi was: "Curiosity, inquiring mind, Try to think!  Make TRIZ familiar for children and teens."  In Japan TRIZ Symposium 2010, Miyanishi family presented their second work done by their second boy Kai.  These works suggest us the possibility of off-class/club activities at schools or at private organizations. 

On the basis of these pioneering experiences, some discussions are summarized in the following 2 slides (below).  We believe that we will be able to start (TRIZ-based) creativity education for elementary school children to high school students if we obtain some chances.  In such cases we should not try to teach (TRIZ) terms and tools, but we should try to attract their interest and to use various ways of thinking not limited to TRIZ.  Approaches of using mostly observations, surveys, discussions, exercises, projects, etc. may be useful.  As suggested in the slide (below-right), we should better cooperate with various people and organizations who are preceding in the education.  The TRIZ community in Japan has already accumulated capability of start such trials by obtaining various chances, I believe.

The original presentation slides of this Special Interest Lecture are already posted in the Official Web site of Japan TRIZ Society   .  In this Web site "TRIZ Home Page in Japan", I have posted a new HTML page of this presentation, containing the presentation slides as well (Dec. 30, 2010).  

 

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Last updated on Sept. 25, 2011.     Access point:  Editor: nakagawa@ogu.ac.jp