AOTS Journal 2018 SPRING No.12 (ENGLISH)

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7No. 12 SPRING 2018It will be June 2018 when they will graduate and the Yoshinoya ofcial told AOTS,‘We would be happy if they came to Yoshinoya after graduation; however, it is still good for them to go boldly ahead in Thailand or other Asian countries.’ Yoshinoya, highly known as the nation-wide giant of the beef-rice-bowl restaurant chain, hopes this endowed course will result in better understanding of the Japanese restaurant business as a whole by Thai students and encouraging their desire to get employed by any Japanese food business as it is an expanding business in Thailand as well as in other Asian countries.As for the endowed course at Darma Persada University, we reported in HIDA Journal #9 (Fall, 2016) on its launching in ‘Introduction to Japan-ASEAN cooperation programs of AMEICC.’ This issue of Journal provides a progress report, as the course has made steady progress, including the purchasing of equipment and organizing of a special seminar by a dispatched expert from Japan. Located in the east of the city of Jakarta, the university is close to Bekasi city where a large-scale industrial park has been developed by a major Japanese trading company. Its local indus-trial society is called ‘Jakarta-Japan Club’ (JJC) and our endowed course at the university has been organized with the help of JJC to reect the needs for human resources by expatriates and its curriculum has been planned and executed accordingly. In particular, AOTS has been coordinating the course in cooperation with PT Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indonesia, one of the major members of JJC, by asking Mr. Ahmad Rozak, General Manager, Dies & Jig Creation Division, to function as chief instructor. We are ne-tuning the curriculum structure as well as providing guidance to the faculty members of the univer-sity. Mr. Rozak happens to be a returned AOTS trainee and he can comprehend the intentions of the secretariat and lead the local members to a better way. One of the biggest features of the endowed course at this university has been the conguration of a new curriculum as an add-on to the existing curriculum for industrial engineering study at the school of engineering. While most of the endowed courses are being practiced during the long vacation of universities, the one at Darma Persada is a part of regular school sessions during the semester. The teaching staff consists of professors of the university mostly and the students are all rst grade students, 30, in the industrial engineering department. Today, all of the rst and second grade students, a total of 60, are being enrolled. We heard that appli-cations exceeding twice the capacity of the course were received by the department for this year. Traditionally, schooling at the university regards textbooks as important, but now the course is gradually adding a more practical curriculum with the installation of equipment such as precision measure-ment tools and jigs so that the students can obtain useful skills in expatriate Japanese corporations. The endowed course is assumed to be a three-year project. However, we are encouraging teaching staff of the university to take part in the project more actively so that the university could continue and improve the curriculum by itself. These efforts include preparation of a syllabus and teaching mate-rials, reviewing of evaluation standards, how to maintain equip-ment among many others. One by one, we are aiming at better conditions. For the very rst special seminar of the endowed course, we invited Dr. Kenji Nishibori, professor emeritus at Daido University, in late October. He gave a lecture on the idea of autonomation and the Toyota Production System for his session of ‘Introduction to Automation.’ Almost 100 students, most of them from industrial engineering study, attended the lecture. They were a bit surprised with cases of Kaizen and autonoma-tion that are as a matter of fact for Japanese corporations but the students could deepen their understanding. The second special seminar was held in early December with the title of ‘Robocon Workshop’ where Mr. Shin Kuboaki, one of the examiners of ET, gave a lecture, and who services were provided courtesy of Japan Embedded Systems Technology Association (JASA) that organizes the robot contests. The work-shop’s aim was to have simple vehicles assembled out of Lego blocks or simplied robots move, commanded by programming of students. Students were divided into teams of three each and they started programming at the cue of the lecturer. When a vehicle could start to drive, the students shouted for joy. This workshop provided training in programming skills while at the same time allowing the students to enjoy their studies, and so was very popular among the students and the original purpose was fullled.At Robot Programming Workshop; students enjoyed driving their machines (Mr. Shin Kuboaki at the right in the middle)Project Team at Darma Persada University (Mr. Ahmad Rozak, fourth from the right, and teaching staff at engineering department)Example of an endowed course at school of engineering at Darma Persada UniversityIndonesia