A brush coating skill training system for manufacturing education at Japanese elementary and junior high schools

In manual training classes at Japanese elementary and junior high schools, many schoolchildren have an awareness that they are not good at manufacturing, and the negative feeling is considered to be due to the shortage of teacher’s manufacturing skill. Audiovisual learning materials are usually used to support the teacher’s manufacturing ability, but in the manufacturing training, audiovisual information is insufficient to convey the certain manufacturing skill. Previously, there have been some research efforts supporting to obtain the particular manufacturing ability. On the other hand, a manufacturing skill training system for elementary and junior high school education has not been addressed enough. Therefore, this study aims to develop a system for supporting teachers of the manual training class at Japanese elementary and junior high schools and especially focuses on brush coating skill, a traditional manufacturing skill with the great necessity to success. The proposed system consists of hardware and software system; as the hardware system, a measurement equipment of brush coating motion was developed using PHANTOM Omni, and as the software system, 3D graphics application to reproduce the records of user’s brush coating operation was designed. Additionally, this paper evaluated each trainee’s brush coating motion and analyzed the relationship between trainees with a torus self-organizing map where the mapping result is for giving the same kind of instruction to trainees who have similar habit and skill level. From the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed system was shown.