ABSTRACT
The present study focused on hands-on activities in a university class, named Engineering Experiments of Material Science, at Nagoya University, Japan. Six undergraduate students, one professor and two teaching assistants (TAs) participated. The class consisted of 10 sessions during 16 weeks, from April to July 2003. One session continued for around 4~5 hours. The task in the class was to design a bathtub based on understanding of physical phenomena such as the RH degassing process and the continuous casting process in a reactor. The reason why we investigated this class is that it was a good case exemplifying Learning by Design (Hmelo et al., 2000; Kolodner et al., 2002) based on the inquiry approach.
