Open Campus Day
By Shizu YAMAGUCHI
Tohoku University held 2-days open campus of 2015, on July 28th and 29th. I visited one of its biggest sites, the School of Engineering, for the first time.
Officials said about 8,000 people came to the event at the School of Engineering.
The School lies in Aobayama. There were some tents for guidance outside, and a sign showed laboratories’ sections to visitors. They have 7 main subjects —Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (famous for spacecraft ‘Hayabusa’), Electrical Information and Physics Engineering etc. Kinoshita & Obayashi Laboratory is one of Electrical Information and Physics Engineering, with the theme of medical engineering.
It was difficult to visit all exhibitions; surprisingly more than 60 sections were inside. A graduate student from Kyoto Univ. said the open campus is a grand-scale event comparing with its of his university’s. It’s so crowded all the time.
I think there’s no vacant section in the afternoon. Lab’s students explained about research for visitors, around 10 audiences.
A high school student from Niigata Pref. told me, “ I didn’t know the School of Engineering had several majors, especially medical engineering.” Visitors could take an alcohol patch test at Kinoshita Lab’s section. The test showed us tolerance to alcohol controlled by genome information. Bioinformatics places between engineering and medical science.
Visitors were high school students, children, adults and 3rd-grade undergraduates. The undergraduates participated the event to decide their Lab from next year.
Then I went to robotics and intelligence system exhibition. Fun to see around—machines I’ve never seen displayed, and I could try to use some of them. (Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time.)
A student explained to me his research for enhancing character recognition skill of 360-degree camera. Finding out certain characters from whole image is more difficult than simple reading.
I was back after listening to the explanation. Students of Kinoshita Lab had started the test and presentation for new visitors. Some told teenagers about admission test. “They give me both clear answers and their opinion to my question”, said a high school student.
I think that it would be difficult to decide a department of science without listening explanation if I were a high school student. I believe every visitor can enjoy and learn about research of a large number of laboratories!
