[Special Feature: 30 Years of SFC] Information Technology Education at SFC

2020/10/06

When I, Nakazawa, entered the Faculty of Policy Management in 1994 as a member of the fifth graduating class, the special classrooms (so-called computer labs) and the Media Center at SFC were equipped with workstations such as the OMRON Luna and Takada Manufacturing's XMiNT (XMiNT was technically an X terminal). Students, including myself, would stay late into the night—sometimes until the next morning—typing away at workstation keyboards, using LaTeX to write reports, writing programs in C, or reading and writing emails.

Since SFC is a campus built on the premise of the internet, information technology and information literacy are essential skills for all students. Consequently, regardless of whether they are in the Faculty of Policy Management or the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, first-year undergraduate students have classes in programming and data science using the aforementioned workstations, a practice that remains unchanged today.

While there are various purposes for providing programming education to all students in both faculties, the primary goal is to cultivate meta-level thinking abilities and to understand how the world around us is structured. In a society predicated on the internet, in order to discover the various problems that arise there, one must understand the structure of the world around them, including the internet itself, how programs running on it are made, and how they operate. Furthermore, the meta-level thinking ability to perceive social phenomena abstractly and to think through solutions for them on one's own is extremely important.

While it is wonderful for students to "become able to write programs," even if they do not reach that level, the power gained through programming education is extremely important in the process of discovering and solving real-world problems.

SFC has also emphasized data science education since its inception. In this century, and particularly in recent years, the term "evidence-based" has become frequently heard. However, since the last century, SFC has implemented data science education for first-year undergraduates in both the Faculty of Policy Management and the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies as a method for correctly identifying problems and objectively evaluating the effectiveness of solutions. There is a wide range of elective subjects, with methods ranging from basic statistical analysis to data mining techniques including deep learning, and applications covering international society, sports, biosystems, environmental governance, business, and more.

Through these classes, students can acquire the fundamental knowledge necessary to conduct empirical research for analyzing social issues. Students can take these courses as needed and utilize them in their own research.

This fundamental philosophy of SFC has been passed down to the present day, with both programming and data science education being provided regardless of the faculty. On the other hand, some aspects are gradually changing due to social shifts and technological progress. The reason workstations were used instead of "PCs" when SFC opened was the desire to innovatively improve the educational environment using distributed systems. To realize this idea, which drew many insights from MIT's Project Athena, computers connected to a network were necessary.

1990, the year SFC opened, was the year Windows 3.0 and the Macintosh Classic were released, and so-called PCs were not yet in a state to be connected to a network. Therefore, we built the Campus Network System (CNS) based on UNIX servers, the X Window System, and NFS, and connected workstations to it.

When SFC opened, none of the students, and only a few of the faculty members, had ever used the X Window System, email, or LaTeX. In 그 sense, a characteristic feature was that both students and faculty stood at the same starting line. Today, however, information education begins in elementary school, and the internet has permeated daily life, leading to a diversification of both students and faculty. New students range from those who are proficient in programming to those who give up from the start, saying it is "impossible."

Under these circumstances, innovation in information technology education has become necessary. Regarding programming education in particular, a new curriculum tailored to student proficiency is becoming necessary, similar to how English language education is divided by level. Furthermore, the connection between data science subjects and programming subjects, as well as the connection between general subjects and these technical subjects, is also becoming important.

From a hardware perspective, the internet-premised campus that SFC initially aimed for can now be realized without UNIX. For this reason, starting around 2000, Windows and Macintosh PCs were introduced to special classrooms in place of UNIX workstations, and SFC became a fairly ordinary university campus. For students who have smartphones connected to the internet, such an SFC is nothing new.

In this state, there is little meaning in simply placing ordinary PCs connected to the internet in a classroom. To use an analogy, this is no different from a teacher buying pencils for elementary school students, sharpening them every day, and lining them up on desks with erasers attached. Therefore, it is now important for students to have the ability to freely master computers, which have become as common as stationery, as their own tools.

Starting this academic year, SFC has introduced Python-based content for foundational information subjects for new students, replacing the previous subjects that used JavaScript and HTML. Python is a programming language frequently used in data science and can, of course, be utilized in all other fields. However, since it is a script language that falls into the easier category among programming languages, it will likely be necessary to prepare more challenging options for students who are already good at programming.

Similar to data science subjects, we are also considering establishing programming subjects specialized in various application fields so that students can use them in their own research. For example, addressing specific areas such as "Cities and Programming," "Art and Programming," or "Economics and Programming" through machine-based measurement, processing, and visualization is well-suited for learning at SFC, which spans multiple academic disciplines.

In the field of data science, we will continue the classes for each application area that we have implemented so far, while also promoting education that focuses on both methods and data. While it is natural to cover statistical analysis and data mining methods in class, the uniqueness of the data being targeted will be important in the future. In addition to general datasets prepared by public research institutions, building SFC's own unique datasets is extremely important for promoting distinctive research and education.

Just as unique substances are born from rare earths, unique research results are born from rare data. Therefore, a plan is currently underway to comprehensively collect and organize data related to people, regions, and society in cooperation with various companies and local governments that SFC has unique connections with. As a result, the large-scale data infrastructure that is built will collaborate with programming subjects, data science subjects, and various general subjects to further enrich education and research at SFC.

Also this academic year, SFC removed all PCs from special classrooms (with some exceptions) to further promote BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices). Originally, it was common for SFC students to bring their own laptops into classrooms to take notes, but information technology subjects for new students were conducted using PCs installed in special classrooms.

However, as mentioned earlier, this spoils the students' ability to master their own computers as electronic stationery. Therefore, even in information technology classes including programming, we decided to ensure that students build their own environments on their own PCs and handle security measures against viruses themselves. Students are free to obtain whatever PC they like, whether it is Windows or Mac. Because of this, conducting classes becomes more complex in information technology courses since the environments cannot be unified. In this year's online classes, it was not easy for faculty, TAs, and SAs to remotely handle program bugs on students' PCs, each with a different environment. Nevertheless, the fact that we had made it possible to conduct information technology classes without depending on university PCs was one factor that allowed us to conduct online classes without major problems.

Thirty years have passed since SFC was established, and as a result of various technological advances during that time, unprecedented programming and data science education has become possible. On the other hand, campus facilities, particularly campus network facilities, have not changed much functionally compared to when the campus opened. In the next 30 years, SFC first needs a cloud system infrastructure that enables large-scale data processing. Using this to enhance the ability to think about things quantitatively will lead directly to the ability to discover and solve problems in society. Additionally, the ability to utilize virtualized computers and the AI running on them for one's own projects will be important in the future society.

Next, literacy regarding entirely new computer architectures will be necessary. Learning the new common sense made possible by innovative architectures like quantum computers will also lead directly to problem-solving and discovery capabilities. Identifying the education and infrastructure that will create these new powers for graduates of the Faculty of Policy Management, the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, and the Graduate School of Media and Governance, and steadily implementing them, will be extremely important for programming and data science education at SFC in the years to come.