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Progress of Unexplored Junior and About the Unexplored Ecosystem

Nov 07, 202414 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6krxSd11As

Digest of video content (parent item is Kondo-san, child item is Nishio if unnamed)

  • Q: Unexplored Juniors are not ranked, correct?
    • A: I can’t rank them. I don’t think it is possible to rank them because they are all amazing in different vectors.
  • Q: What kind of people apply? People who want to start a business or have something they want to create?
    • A: There are both, and so many different types that it’s hard to say which is more common.
  • Q: Do you have a “who would you like to see here”?
    • A: Individual mentors are sending out messages. I don’t think it will work if you try to aim at this because it’s moiety. This cannot be put into words. It is when you see the actual proposal that you decide whether you are impressed or not.
    • Like the common marketing saying that “a customer cannot decide if he or she wants a product until you show it to him or her,” the mentor does not know whether or not he or she will want to support the proposal until he or she sees it in action.
    • Therefore, instead of making proposals based on what is being sought, I think it would be better to make a passionate appeal, saying, “This is what I want to make! I think it would be better to make an enthusiastic appeal.
    • (Related: The Parable of the Bow and Arrow)
  • Q: Will it be updated?
    • (Yasukawa) Updated this year. Originally, I had written “taking advantage of web features,” but the actual adoption didn’t match that at all, so I removed it. In retrospect, I realized that what I was focusing on was “passion.”
    • (Nishio)After adopting a number of things, I began to think that the branches and leaves were not so important, and then it became more and more abstract, such as “taking on new challenges” and “passion.
  • Q: Can’t it be seen as a game to capture the mentor?
    • It is more like “you will be unhappy if you do that” rather than “you will be in trouble. After all, “Unexplored Junior” is a “project to support what you want to do,” so if it is adopted, it is not us who will do it, but everyone who applied, and if you do not propose what you really want to do, it will only make it harder for you later on even if it is adopted.
  • Q: It sounds like it’s very much a mentor-agnostic or left to the mentor’s judgment.
    • (Yasukawa) The IPA’s Unexplored Project, which started in 2000, similarly allows a high degree of individual discretion, and after more than 20 years of doing it, I still consider that to be a desirable thing. Both myself and Mr. Nishio are graduates of the IPA Unexplored Project, and we share its values.
    • (Nishio) In both projects, I believe in the power of the personal connoisseur, called PM or mentor. If we have a committee and say, “Let’s consult with everyone and make a decision,” everyone will inevitably become irresponsible. Instead, one mentor takes full responsibility for the project and makes the decision, which is more powerful.
    • ExaKids story, difficult to create “evaluation criteria” because it is broad and not limited to IT
    • It is practically impossible to decide on evaluation criteria; the proposal side is becoming more and more diverse, so if you decide on evaluation criteria, it will be retarded and old-fashioned. If you really want to evaluate something new, it is more correct to have no evaluation criteria.
      • (Related: [No numerical criteria should be used to evaluate researchers.)
  • Interesting that it’s “late.”
    • (Yasukawa) There is a tradeoff. If we set standards, there will be economies of scale. If criteria are set, hundreds of works can be reviewed, but the number of unexplored juniors is limited by not doing so. There are advantages and disadvantages, and it is preferable for society to have both.
    • (Nishio)You are right. The advantage of setting standards is that it improves efficiency, so standards are necessary if we want to process a large number of items. On the other hand, if we set standards, we will be left behind from changes in reality. Since this is a trade-off, it is good to have a balance of both in society.
  • ExaKids now has judging criteria for both the first and final rounds, but maybe the latter should be eliminated. If there are judging criteria, there will be a debate about whether the judging is fair or not, but maybe it would be less unfair to the presenters if the judging criteria were removed and the decision was based on whether the judges were goofy or not.
    • One good thing about that method is that even if your project is rejected, you can make a developmental suggestion, “It’s not that your project was bad, it’s just that there happened to be no adults there who could understand how good your project is, so why don’t you go somewhere new and show more people? I can do that.
    • If the criteria for good or bad is set and “your project is a bad project according to the criteria,” then I would lose interest in continuing. However, since all the projects that come up for review at such places are generally “good projects,” it would be a waste to let them wither away.
  • Q: What do you think about the issue of the same people winning?
    • (This is often observed in the Junior Unexplored contests. I think this kind of thing tends to happen in contests that are separated by age. On the other hand, as for the “Unexplored Ecosystem,” there are programs such as “Unexplored IT” for under 24 years old and “Unexplored Advanced” without age limit after being accepted in “Unexplored Junior” for under 17 years old, so I think it would be good if they could challenge programs for graduate students or programs without age limit.
      • (Nishio added: If you want to do business in society, there is no preferential treatment based on age.)
    • (Nishio) If the problem is that the same people are winning prizes, adults should do their best to discover more people who are worthy of winning prizes. If a small number of people grow, only those people will win prizes, but if 100 people grow, they will be selected from among those 100 people, so the winners will vary. Adults need to do their best to increase the number of people who are worthy of winning prizes by doing more to discover and nurture them.
  • Q: Which is more important in terms of “cultivating” or “discovering” junior unexplored?
    • (Yasukawa) Both
    • (Nishio)To tell the truth, I would like to support and nurture all the projects that have applied, but to do so would require 100 of my bodies. In reality, I only have one body, so I have no choice but to select some of them. Maybe this is why the excavation factor comes into play.
  • Q: I’m torn between having contestants grow through the contest and discovering those who have already grown and are still buried.
    • This is my subjective opinion, not the general consensus of the MEXT Junior Program, but since the MEXT Junior Program is a project in which mentors accompany and work on a project for several months, I think that the emphasis should be on training rather than on discovery. I wonder what mentors do when they accompany a project that is already well developed, and whether mentors create value for society. So I think this type of project should have a weight in development.
    • On the other hand, if you are looking at a single proposal and awarding it, I don’t think you have the time to do the nurturing. Because it takes time to cultivate. So the shorter the event, the more weight will be given to excavation.
    • (Yasukawa) The official expression of the IPA is to “discover and nurture outstanding IT human resources. It is a set of shining a light on something amazing and accompanying and nurturing it.
  • Q: What is Unexplored Ecosystem?
    • The four projects, “Unexplored IT,” “Unexplored Advanced,” “Unexplored Target,” and “Unexplored Junior,” work in close cooperation with each other. For example, graduates of the Junior Program apply to the IT Program, graduates of the IT Program apply to the Advanced Program, and graduates of the Advanced Program act as mentors for the Junior Program, thus creating a flow of people and a network of people. We consider this to be the “Unexplored Ecosystem.
  • Q: I’m doing a contest and want to do “something that goes beyond that” and “a mechanism for people to connect with those who have come out”.
    • In 2011, I wrote an article titled “Unexplored as a network formation system” about how the “Unexplored” project functions as a system to create a network of people. What was good about it was that it was not just a group of current students and their peers who had been selected for the program, but it also provided a place where past alumni could participate and get to know each other every year. In this way, apart from the community of synchronized peers for each year, a warp was generated, and people were knitted together by the warp and the weft, and so on. I think this is the reason why the “ecosystem” has come to attract so much attention.
  • Q: Good.
    • One of the points that can be easily adopted is to create a place for alumni to communicate with current students. In fact, the Unexplored Juniors were born out of the Unexplored OB/OG community.
  • Q: I’m glad that people who have participated two or three times do things behind the scenes, or do things to make things more exciting, not to help me win.
    • That’s a very good thing. In other words, individuals are working to contribute to the betterment of the community based on their own enthusiasm. This is a very good thing, and if the management does something to fuel the fire, it will become a big [campfire (usually large, and for gathering and singing, etc.)
  • Q: Connecting is difficult for elementary school students. They don’t have a phone, etc., and there is not much they can do at their own discretion.
    • (The unexplored ecosystem has been in place for 20 years, so there is a sense of age discrepancy.
    • (Nishio) It is difficult for elementary school students to play a hub role in the network because they are elementary school students, It would be a good idea to nurture them with the expectation that they will be active in 10 years’ time.
  • Q: What pieces are missing now?
    • (Yasukawa)As an individual mentor of Unexplored Junior, all I can do is “what to adopt.” In my own adoption, rather than trying to follow the trend, I would like to put the trend aside and choose projects that I like and am passionate about, thereby increasing the number of highlighted fields and making a wider range of fields I think it would be good if more people would pay attention.
    • (Nishio)I think what Mr. Yasukawa is trying to say is that he wants to break down the framework of the assumption that “this kind of proposal will be adopted and this kind of proposal will not be adopted”.
    • (Nishio)To tell the truth, it would be nice if we could listen to all 100 proposals for about an hour and return feedback, but in reality we only have one body, so we have to choose about 10. But I think it is a waste not to give feedback back to the remaining 90 people, and I think that if the world were filled with more “opportunities to have people listen carefully to what you want to do for an hour and give you productive feedback,” the world would be a better place. It would be a waste to have a gap between those who happen to have such an opportunity and those who do not, so it is preferable if “everyone has someone they can talk to”. This is my answer to your question, “What is the missing piece?
  • Q: You say it would be nice to have more small mentors. You’re right, maybe there aren’t any. When we created ExaKids, there were kids who were making amazing things, and they were like, “No one listens to me. When I told the teachers at school, they said, “Don’t worry about that, do your homework.”…
    • It is a waste. It is more important in the future to “work on themes you have thought of” than to “do the homework you have been told to do,” but schools are not changing quickly enough to evaluate this, and it is a waste for children to be left behind because of the slow update of the evaluation system at schools. It is a waste that some children are left out because schools are slow to update their evaluation systems. It is not right to say that some children are left behind because of the school’s slow update of the evaluation system.
    • (When I heard that, I thought, “Why not CoderDojo?
    • (I’m not familiar with CoderDojo, so I’ll go check it out soon, but I think CoderDojo is one solution.
    • (Yasukawa) For those who don’t know, CoderDojo is a programming club outside of school, where there is no curriculum or teaching materials, but rather each person brings in what they want to create or what they want to do, and the mentors listen to what they have to say rather than teach. There are about 200 such places in Japan.
  • ITeens Lab is a for-profit programming school, but the policies are close, and it seems to me that the core value of the school is to “provide people who listen” rather than materials and curriculum. I’m convinced by what you said about the lack of mentors rather than teaching materials.
    • Maybe educational materials can be scaled and widely communicated, but mentoring cannot be widely implemented by saying “read this”, it requires a human being to listen. This unscalable nature may cause shortages.
  • Many children say, “No one listens to me.”
    • It’s a waste of time because there just happens to be no one within physical proximity who “gets it. It’s a waste that there are no “people who understand” within a close physical proximity to the content.
    • The Internet has made it possible to connect places that are far apart, so I think it would be mutually happy if they could find people who are like them and, if possible, people of similar age groups.
  • The color of your eyes changes.
    • I think it will change your life.
  • I would like to add an entertainment element to educational events, and I believe that such an element is also lacking in the industry.
    • Chinese robot contests and even animated cartoons are being developed, and they have become heroes for the children. I have the impression that they are doing a pretty good job of creating “admiration” by introducing the robot with cool pictures like “He is the engineer who created this system! I have the impression that they are doing a pretty good job of creating “admiration.
  • Q: Don’t the unexplored juniors try to create role models?
    • (Yasukawa) I have the image that role models are being released in bunches on a project-by-project basis that has adopted them.
    • (Nishio) I think it would be right to make it more visible to young people where young people are active, since the role models we adults think of are already old-fashioned.
  • Q: The philosophy of ExaKids is “Let the kids see the future.” Instead of adults defining the future, we look at what the kids have come up with and say, “So that’s what the future will look like! and ask them to tell us.
    • I feel the same way. I think it is important to feel that the children are teaching us.

—memo - The Intellectual Production of Engineers was included in the title because I am an engineer, but I have been told from various quarters that it is useful for non-engineers as well.

  • A book that logically verbalizes what intellectual production is from an engineer’s perspective.

Satoru Kondo

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/未踏ジュニアの歩みと未踏エコシステムについて using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.

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