History

Because the School of Engineering Science was established with mixed teaching staff from the Schools of Engineering and the School of Science, it has a special feature in the educational and research activities: providing all the students with scientific approaches for solving practical engineering problems, and carrying out research in the multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary areas. This school created new research areas and eventually established the departments of information technology and bioengineering.

The concept of “Engineering Science” was first proposed in the USA soon after the launch of Sputnik, to catch up with the Soviet space technology program by modernizing engineering education.

The engineering education at the time was carried out in each small department separately without any connection to other departments. For this reason many small departments, such as the department for aeronautics, ship building, textile and mining machines, machine tools, etc., were teaching precise technologies related with each area of engineering work. This teaching system functioned well as long as each technology was concerned, but the system could hardly cope with new technologies such as space engineering.

In the education of engineering science, the basic scientific knowledge from many departments, such as hydrodynamics and solid mechanics, electronics, chemistry, and material science are taught. It is expected that, for example, if students study hydrodynamics, they should be able to handle air flow in designing the wings of airplanes, know the optimum shape of ships in order to reduce wave resistance, and understand water flow in the pipes of power generator, etc.

Since the results of scientific research had already been the essential subjects of engineering education at the time, this new method of teaching was smoothly employed in the universities in the USA from the beginning of the 1960s, and spread very quickly.

Around this time (i.e. at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 60s), Japanese industry was just recovering from its collapse after World War II, and the government was trying to increase the number of engineers for future industrialization of the country. The number of students in the engineering departments was increasing rapidly. Instead of increasing the number of the students in engineering departments, Osaka University decided to launch the “School of Engineering Science”.

The School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, teaches mainly common areas in engineering. The students are recommended to attend many lectures in other departments in order to expand their views, and comparatively large amounts of teaching time are allocated to mathematics.

The idea of engineering science, in which common engineering subjects are taught mainly with scientific methodology, fit well with the Japanese situation at the time of rapid economic growth when many new engineering areas were being introduced, and the areas of engineering work were expanding. Many Japanese universities employed the teaching method of engineering science, but they did not establish any special school for it, except for Osaka University.