2025 (Current Year) Faculty Courses School of Life Science and Technology First-Year Courses
International Bio-Creative Design【School of Life Science and Technology】
- Academic unit or major
- First-Year Courses
- Instructor(s)
- Tomoko Matsuda / Takashi Suzuki / Steven Ray Davis / Shawn Mcglynn
- Class Format
- Exercise
- Media-enhanced courses
- -
- Day of week/Period
(Classrooms) - Class
- -
- Course Code
- XLS.B104
- Number of credits
- 010
- Course offered
- 2025
- Offered quarter
- 4Q
- Syllabus updated
- Mar 24, 2025
- Language
- Japanese
Syllabus
Course overview and goals
Students are divided into the small groups and select a topic they would like learn and discuss from corona virus related research or "The Breakthrough of the year" selected by the Journal "Science". Then, they
1. Understand the science behind the finding. (Learn new things)
2. Explain it in clear logic to the audience in plain English.
3. Build an idea to make it even more useful to the society, and explain it.
Every person has to give a presentation in English at least once. All the discussion and the presentation should be done in English in principle. However, they can do the discussion partly in Japanese.
Course description and aims
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
1. acquire wide technical knowledge about the bio-science and technology
2. apply deep originality and sharpen their spirit of inquiry
3. discuss in a small group
4. present orally in English
5. acquire strong leadership, sense of cooperation, flexibility, situation grasp ability, stress control ability to go to the global community
6. demonstrate their ability in an English environment undeterred by language challenges
Keywords
creativity, advanced biotechnology and bioscience, discussion, international cooperation, English communication
Competencies
- Specialist skills
- Intercultural skills
- Communication skills
- Critical thinking skills
- Practical and/or problem-solving skills
Class flow
There is group discussion time and presentations opportunity. Each team select a topic and understand it and find the further progress of the topic.
Course schedule/Objectives
| Course schedule | Objectives | |
|---|---|---|
| Class 1 | Introduction | Selection of the interesting topics from corona virus related research or "The Breakthrough of the year" selected by the Journal "Science". |
| Class 2 | Group discussion, how to do presentation in English | Know the scientific content of the breakthrough. Know how to do effective presentation in English. |
| Class 3 | Group discussion | Group discussion |
| Class 4 | Midterm presentation | Midterm presentation |
| Class 5 | Practice for the final presentation | Practice for the final presentation |
| Class 6 | Final presentation on Jan 16, 2026, 12:30-18:00 (Suzukakedai campus) | Final presentation |
| Class 7 | Evaluate the presentations | Discuss superior and week points of the presentations |
Study advice (preparation and review)
To enhance effective learning, students are encouraged to spend approximately 100 minutes preparing for class and another 100 minutes reviewing class content afterwards (including assignments) for each class.
They should do so by referring to textbooks and other course material.
Textbook(s)
none
Reference books, course materials, etc.
none
Evaluation methods and criteria
At each classes, activeness during the group discussion and cooperativity are evaluated.
The final presentation will be evaluated for scientific content, presentation ability, and creativity.
The English linguistic ability is not targeted for an evaluation.
Related courses
- Introduction to Bio-Frontier Research【School of Life Science and Technology】
- School of Life Science and Technology Literacy
- Advanced Bio-Creative Design
Prerequisites
Knowledge of basic bioscience and biotchnology