May 8, 2000
From virtual to real: UW and Japanese students to meet face-to-face after cyberspace collaboration
You might call it real virtuality.
That’s how some University of Washington freshmen are describing the chance to finally meet Japanese students from Tohoku University with whom they collaborated fall quarter via cyberspace on a series of engineering projects. The teamwork was part of a new class designed to introduce beginning college students to hands-on engineering in the international arena.
On Friday, the virtual relationships forged last year will move into the real world when the groups meet face-to-face to present their projects at the third annual UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. Eleven of the Japanese students and a professor will make the trip to Seattle for a three-day visit. The presentations will be during two sessions Friday, 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 2:50 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. in the HUB room 108.
UW student Chris Norby said he’s looking forward to interacting with his overseas partners in real time.
“It will be really nice to not have to type, send and wait for a response this time,” said Norby. “We’ll probably still have some fun with the language issue, I assume.”
The Japanese students will also spend time with their American counterparts in the dorms, added classmate Stephen Gmur. “They’ll be getting the entire UW experience.”
During the class, which was the first binational course ever offered by the College of Engineering, students formed international teams to work on one of eight projects. The teams communicated via e-mail and interactive video to coordinate their work. The idea was to give the students a first-hand taste of what engineering is like in an increasingly interconnected world, according to Gretchen Kalonji, UW material science and engineering professor who developed the idea for the course with Japanese colleague Tetsuo Shoji while on sabbatical at Tohoku. She was there again recently, and suggested that the students travel to Seattle for the symposium. Initially there were just two takers.
“They were a bit shy, and one of the students asked if it was safe,” Kalonji said. After hearing her assurances, an additional nine decided to come.
The meeting will be the perfect crowning event for a class that already has taught them a lot, the UW students say. Doing original research rather than experiments with known outcomes allowed creativity to flourish. Dealing with barriers of distance and language honed problem-solving strategies.
“One thing I guess I had to learn was patience,” said Ben Bethurum. “Coordinating things long distance, it was easy to get frustrated.”
Nels Jewell-Larsen said he learned about planning and rolling with the punches.
“You need to put a lot of forethought into it,” Jewell-Larsen said. “But don’t expect things to actually happen as planned. You need to put flexibility into the schedule to deal with what comes up.”
Kalonji said the value of the class was not just involving the students in real engineering projects, but putting those projects in an international team environment. That seems to have generated a lot of enthusiasm, she said. In Tohoku, students are pressing for a similar sophomore-level course in what they are calling “creativity engineering.” At the UW, the collaborations have fostered interest that continues to grow, despite the fact that the class officially ended months ago.
“Students with six of the eight projects are continuing their research,” said Kalonji, who, with Denice Denton, dean of the College of Engineering and a co-instructor in the class, meets with the students every other Tuesday. “That’s an indication of how successful the program was – we can’t stop them now that they’ve started!”
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For more information, contact Kalonji at (206) 543-1115 or kalonji@u.washington.edu, or Denton at (206) 543-0340 or denton@engr.washington.edu. A Web site on the symposium is located at www.washington.edu/research/urp/symp/index.html. For information on the fall quarter class, check http://courses.washington.edu/uwtohoku/. Students can be contacted at bbethurum@hotmail.com (Bethurum); nelsjl@u.washington.edu (Jewell-Larsen); and sgmur@u.washington.edu (Gmur).
