NARIKA's Equipment Brings Excitement and Hands-on Science Learning to Students Around the World

Can you give us an overview of your company?

This is a photo from May. For three years during COVID, we were not able to gather or if we were then only with masks, but this May, one year after the Japanese government downgraded COVID on par with a common flu, we all gathered and took this photo finally without masks.

We are a small company. We only have 88 members in the company and half of them are men and half of them are women. We have our headquarters in Tokyo, and we have offices in Sendai, Osaka and Fukuoka. We also have a distribution center in the suburb of Tokyo (Tochigi prefecture).

Our core business is science education equipment (from elementary school to university level), but we also cover programming and LEGO Education. We also do a small portion of preschool and interactive whiteboard (IWB) business and sell our products overseas.

Japanese education values hands-on experience through conducting hands-on experiments in science education, so as a company policy, hands-on experiments are very important.

We have three policies. First, we make the teacher the star of the classroom. Second, we elevate science education for the students by using our products for hands-on experiments. Third, we have over 500 distributors domestically and internationally, so we want them to feel proud that they are contributing to Japanese education. We are actively involved in doing school visits and exhibitions and we hold over 200 workshops annually in Japan.

This is a photo, from 1909, of my grandfather, the founder. Our business started in a central part of Tokyo called Kanda-Jinbocho. There is a major publisher called Sanseido that had an educational business at that time, but they shifted their resources to the creation of the first Japanese encyclopedia and closed their education business. As a result, this education business, especially the physics piece, was taken by my grandfather and made into a separate company.

In the 1950's, we incorporated and changed our name to Nakamura Scientific then, in 1984, we started our business with a US partner. In 2004, we started our LEGO Educational business by becoming a Japanese distributor of LEGO Educational. Then in 2006 we started IWB business with Promethean domestically.

In 2007, we started providing workshops for teachers in Japan about learning how to conduct experiments in their classrooms. The instructors for the workshops used to be teachers and we have contracts with them to give lectures to teachers to increase their experimental skills. This is important because we have found that teachers prefer to listen to other teachers. We also have training opportunities where we, the staff, can learn from the teachers.

Japanese education actually has stringent standards and regulations (school curriculum guidelines) set by the Ministry of Education that specify what should be included in student education. This is precisely delineated and applies not only to public schools but also to private schools.

Right after the end of World War II, the Japanese Society of Physics and Chemistry Education stated that science would be the path for the future of Japan. In response to this statement, the Japanese government introduced a new Science Education Promotion Act, which calls for all schools in Japan to conduct science observation and experiments education and let the students have hands-on experience by providing educational equipment that positively influences our business. Until then, science education was more a matter of teachers conducting experiments for the students, but this act reversed that, introducing an educational system where students themselves experience and carry out experiments and observations themselves.

It is true that there has been a positive impact on our exports, but not that much. The market is small and niche, so maybe a shift to purchasing Japanese products is not a huge move.

What would you say is the main difference between Japanese products, especially for education, which is such an important field for any society, compared to products manufactured in other Asian countries? What makes them different and why should people buy them?

The advantage of Japanese educational products, especially in the science fields, is that Japan has accumulated a long history of hands-on science learning, particularly through observation and experiments. Our company has over 106 years of history and over those years, we have grown together with the market. For example, in mandatory education for elementary school, students have hands-on science experience using our products and we learn from the students and the teachers what improvements should be made to this educational equipment, and we have continuously made improvements on the products that we provide so they are easier and safer to use and are more efficient for the educational experiments. That accumulation of history and product development is our uniqueness and advantage.

Another problem that’s facing Japan that’s getting a lot of coverage in the media is the declining population and the declining birth rate. It’s estimated that in just 15 years, one-third of all people in Japan will be over the age of 60. That presents multiple problems for businesses, including a shrinking domestic market and difficulty in finding staff. In the education sector, fewer children will mean smaller class sizes. For your company in particular, what are the challenges or the opportunities that this demographic change can represent?

We consider population decline as a grave issue, since a declining number of children means there will be fewer schools, which means less sales for us. Also, with fewer children, the burden of supporting the aging population will increase, so having a vast knowledge, including scientific knowledge, will be even more important. In science especially, the technology has advanced so much that children now start using smartphones immediately and without knowing what the old types of telephones were like, but learning how sound is transmitted and how telephones evolved is important and necessary for understanding the past and creating the future. It is important for them to have clear and fundamental knowledge that maybe our generation shares as common knowledge that needs to be passed down to the next generation.

Also, social media is very prevalent now and there is much fake news, and in order for the person to determine if that is fake or not, he or she needs to have a concrete knowledge of science. Having this basic education in elementary and middle schools and learning about fundamental science is important to survive in today’s world.

Can you elaborate how Narika is mitigating the impact of the shrinking market, and also how you’re contributing to the advances of knowledge for students when it comes to science?

At Narika, research and development are an important core component of the business. Recently, the number of hours allotted for science education in schools has been reduced, so we cannot do what we were doing in the past. We have been developing more user-friendly designs so that the product usage becomes more intuitive and requires less effort for the teachers to teach students how to use the equipment, so that they have more time for conducting experiments.

A microscope is the most used piece of science equipment in elementary, middle, and high schools, and adjusting focus takes time and effort, so this becomes burdensome for smaller children or those who are not interested in science. To help with this, we added a function called Easy-focusing that helps more quickly focus the microscope (see photo above of Atoma II biological microscope) by adding 2 green dots on the body. If the lines are close, it is almost in focus. Now, a teacher can go around and easily check even from a distance if the focus is close enough, but if the students are taking time to focus, the teacher could tell them to just adjust to the green dots.

We allocate 5% to R&D. Scientific equipment usually lasts and is used for over ten years, so it is important to have durable products. That is the biggest difference between made in Japan and made in China. And we are very particular about scientific precision by designing and producing products that reproduce theoretically correct experiment results, so we do not take any shortcuts or modifications to the equipment.

For example, we have a product that demonstrates basic principles of physics (effect of gravity on projectile motion) by shooting two balls at each other (see photo above). This equipment requires very high precision and high quality by allowing the sizes of the balls to be small enough to clearly show their motion and collision.

You briefly mentioned your active panel interactive whiteboard that is used for presentations. This is something that can apply to individual learning for students, where they can have their own connected device. It has an ActivInspire school license, and you can do screen sharing as well. What sort of feedback have you received from teachers about how this product has sustained engagement and made a more interactive lesson for students?

Traditionally, Japanese education has valued handwriting as a way of learning. The idea is that students taking notes will lead to organization of the knowledge in their heads, so the good thing about this active panel is that you can actually write on it. Teachers can write on this active panel whiteboard when they are teaching and what they write is shared with the students.

Another advantage of this active panel is that you can keep track and record all the things the teacher has done with it, so the teacher can reflect on what they have done today or use other days’ notes from the whiteboard to show to the students. This is one of the advantages that could be seen within this traditional education system. Another application is, for example, taking a photo of what a student is looking at with a microscope and do a screen share amongst all the students to compare what she is seeing with what other students are seeing.

Recently, computer measurement as a part of increased use of information and communication technology (ICT) has been considered as an important, integrated part of learning in science education. Of course, it is very important for students to start from simple and then move to more difficult, that is first use a ticker timer with a tape to verify the acceleration of a moving object, but after that, a student can change the conditions. For example, if a moving object gets heavier by 100 grams, how would the speed change? Then in order to acquire more data, computer measurement is important in learning the logic or pattern.

Another product I wanted to ask about is your BeeSpi V, which is your compact speed measurement photogate that can take measurements without being attached to a computer. This portability is a clear benefit, but it also allows students to take notes, to interpret their data, and to make graphs without a computer, so it’s a useful learning tool. Can you talk a little about the learning advantages of this type of tool versus a computer-based system?

Actually, you cannot generate a graph, but the BeeSpi V is a recorder which can measure and record speed (velocity) of a moving object. It can be used with some of our other products, but it is only a simple speed meter that is highly useful in understanding the speed of moving objects. Its strength is fast data collection, a lot of experiment data can be acquired in a short time on the spot. Prior to this product, there was not any equipment that could easily take a speed measurement, so BeeSpi V is a very efficient piece of equipment for understanding and making calculations to understand the theory of the physics of motion. It is also very easy to use, and it fulfills students’ curiosity in understanding physics theory.

To give you a bit of context, in Japanese companies resigning from your job when you get married or give birth is still very common for female employees.

Furthermore, Japanese companies tend to recruit men as regular employees (with prospect of promotion), but women as general office employees (with limited possibilities for promotion or advancement in terms of role or salary).

On the other hand, our approach is different, we think that regarding work skill there is no difference between genders, therefore we are recruiting and employing everybody as regular employees. Perhaps by doing so, we are able to attract highly motivated people as well as almost all employees do not leave their job when getting married or giving birth. These things are likely related to active participation of women in our company.

Additionally, we have a well-rounded maternity leave scheme. And, of course, I am a female president. We are a family-run company, and we consider our employees as part of our big family.

We’ve seen that partnerships play a role in your business and that you have partnered with Promethean on your IWB. Could you talk a little about the importance of partnerships to your business and if you’re seeking any other partners, particularly in the global market in the future?

Yes, we are looking overseas to compensate for the shrinking market in Japan due to the aging society.

You’ve already got an overseas presence and distributors around the world where you export your products, including France, the United States, and the UK. You said you’re looking to expand your business. Have you identified any particular countries or regions which you’re targeting for that expansion?

Our biggest market is the US, because of their size, and they are always putting a lot of effort into the advancement of science and technology, therefore there is a great need for science educational products in schools, thus we want to expand there even more than now.

What is fortunate for our business is that science is a common language, so everywhere in the world has a need for similar scientific equipment, but countries such as the US, South Korea, Taiwan, UK, Germany and France value more of a hands-on experiential education.

France, especially, is one of the few countries like Japan, where the government dictates what kind of experiments should be conducted in classrooms, so having partners and a presence in a country like this is important.

I have one last question for you. Your company is celebrating its 106th anniversary. Let’s imagine that we come back four years from now, for your 110th anniversary, and we have this interview again. What message would you like to send to the world and what goals do you hope to accomplish over the next four years?

I hope that, globally, students in every part of the world can enjoy hands-on science experiments and thanks to that be able to find new possibilities for the future. And I want Narika to contribute to that domestically and internationally. I also want our company to keep developing new types of equipment and programs that will enhance the curiosity and understanding of the students. The Japanese education system, especially its subjects, are very separated from science to social studies to math, but education should be more of an integrated cross-subject, cross-curriculum experience together with focus on STEAM programs. By having Narika provide more integrated means of learning about society and finding solutions, we want to contribute to the advancement of the society as well as create an enjoyable atmosphere for the students to learn, while making teachers and our business partners proud of their jobs.

For more information, visit: https://global.narika.jp/