Students from Loyola College and Loyola-ICAM College of Engineering & Technology (LICET) in Chennai are participating in the Project-based Learning (PBL) programme at the Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) in Tokyo from August 1 to August 8, 2019. The students have been sponsored to participate in this PBL program by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), an independent organisation associated with the Government of Japan. 

The Project-based learning (PBL) programme is an international student exchange designed for learning, organised by SIT in collaboration with National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST) and Wide Mandala Catholic University in Surabaya (WMCU), in which 10 students each from Taiwan and Indonesia are invited.

In 2019, the program invitation has been extended to the students in Loyola Campus in India through the Nichi-In Centre for Regenerative Medicine (NCRM), an Indo-Japan organisation working on Regenerative Medicine, a collaborator to Loyola. 

The students from chemistry departments of Loyola and LICET were selected through a two-tier exam-assignment based assessments. The PBL programme is meant to study problem-solving for two tasks — using methods and concepts in chemistry with materials that will be available locally within the vicinity of the SIT campus and have interaction amongst themselves. This program will also provide an exposure to the students about Higher Education in Japan, the programmes run at SIT and also the culture of Japan.

During the programme, the students will have an opportunity to visit Applied Chemistry Labs in SIT. Once the students come back from the PBL programme, a Nichi-In Loyola Shibaura (NILS) Partnership programme has been planned where students will be involved in application-oriented research-based projects and few years down the lane student research groups will be established to foster Indo-Japan collaborative research and entrepreneurship innovations.