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A Project Based Learning through International Collaboration with Students, Inhabitants and Local Professionals

A novel, practical town planning project was devised in 1997 as an educational program for third-grade students at the Department of Architecture, Niigata University. The architectural design and planning project plays an important role in actual town planning for Tochio in Niigata, Japan, through the construction of traditional wooden arcades named Gangi. Working on a voluntary basis, students, local inhabitants and professionals collaborate to design and construct one Gangi each academic year. Students can display and improve their creativity and communicative skills as professional engineers in a project with real-world implications. While celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the project in 2016, we expanded the program internationally by inviting guests from the Dalian Institute of Technology in China to participate. This meant that students from five institutions in Niigata, Tokyo and China worked in collaboration with local inhabitants on the design and construction of another wooden arcade. Postgraduate students of Niigata University were responsible for supporting the Chinese students by exchanging data and discussing the design process via internet link-up. Following their dedicated work, the team from Dalian Institute of Technology were awarded a prize for their construction of the Gangi. Upon completion of the program, students were asked to evaluate the designs and their cognition regarding the design process, with data collected via questionnaire and then analyzed. This report details the contents and characteristics of our program, as well as the outcomes of collaboration, which has led to the successful construction of eighteen Gangi since the program's inception.