15 th International Symposium on Advances in Technology Education 20-23 September 2022, Singapore Educational Practices for Teenage Students to Improve Quality of Architectural Works - An Approach Using Evolution Thinking at Anan KOSEN (National Institute of Technology) Dr. Yutaka TADA * a , Dr.Takashi Matsumoto a , Dr. Ryuzburo SUGINO a and Eisuke TACHIKAWA b a Cource of Creative Engineering, National Insititute of Tech, Anan Collage, Anan City, JAPAN b Cource of Creative Engineering, National Insititute of Tech, Anan Collage, Anan City, and CEO, NOSIGNER, Yokohama City, JAPAN *y_tada@anan-nct.ac.jp Abstract At National Institute of Technology (Kosen), Japan, early architectural education is provided from the age of 15. However, it is difficult to train younger people with little social experience as engineers with design abilities in the current VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) era. Although design thinking has been used for engineering design education in previous studies, younger students may not have a backbone to define problems. Also, while design thinking emphasizes teamwork, it is difficult to always give issues through teamwork in actual classes. Therefore, in this research, we focused on evolutionary thinking in which anyone can demonstrate creativity and that can be implemented by individuals or groups. In this report, students of Kosen’s Anan College are divided into two control groups and challenged to an architectural competition where they must propose an outdoor space for sustainable activities by revitalizing communities in the centre of a local city with a limited budget. Their evaluations are then compared from September to October 2021. Two control groups were given 3 classes: the 1 st class was a description of the competition, the 2 nd was concept making, and the 3 rd was a design check. In the 2 nd class, one of the two control groups (26 students of the 2 nd grade, 16 years old) was given a lecture for using the evolution thinking, the other (25 students of the 3 rd grade, 17 years old) was given a lecture on design thinking. Their work was evaluated with a 5- point rubric (A: Regenerate the community, B: Useful for sustainable activities, C: Form with the concept, D: Fits within budget, E: Design on paper matches the concept.) As a result, the second graders had higher evaluation points for two categories (A: regenerate the community, D: fits within budge) and a significance level of 0.05. In addition, it was confirmed that the second graders were evaluated higher overall by the covariance structure model. This result suggests that evolutionary thinking may be effective in early architectural design education. Keywords: adaptation, mutation, design thinking, teenager Introduction National Institute of Technology (NIT), Anan College (NITAC) is one of 51 schools called “Kosen” in Japanese with 55 campuses throughout Japan, and is located in Anan City, Tokushima Prefecture, about 120km southwest of Osaka. Kosen is a higher education institution that accepts junior high school graduates and provides integrated education for five years in order to train engineers needed by local society, unlike the university education system. NITAC has an advanced course that provides specialized education for two years after a five-year main course, and is accredited by the Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) joined by the Washington Accord. One of the educational achievement goals (competencies) of NITAC, which is common with the JABEE program, is to train “engineers who emphasize manufacturing and have design ability to realize technical ideas and creative thinking.” Achieving this capability is not easy for Kosen students who have less experience with social participation than general college students over 18 years old in the era of VUCA where major changes in the social environment such as international political and economic position and climate change are occurring. In engineering education, many educational practices incorporating the design thinking have been reported in order to accurately grasp issues and improve the ability to design in such a complicated society. Design thinking is a competency that organizes the activity process of professionals practicing design, and a typical model is the "five steps" of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design of Stanford University known as d.school. The five steps consist of empathy, problem definition, creation, prototype, and testing as shown in Fig. 1, and the team examines the process from divergence to convergence and from abstraction to the