As part of our educational reform promotion project, we will be conducting a student-participation Gobi Desert dinosaur fossil excavation for two years from the 2022 academic year, with the aim of enhancing the dinosaur museum education program. The experience took place in the area of Shartsakh in the southwestern Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia, where the Mongolian government has granted permission for excavation. A total of 12 people participated, including five students, three faculty members from our university, and four Mongolian instructors, and the excavation took place over 13 days from August 19 to August 31, 2023. The five students came from different fields of expertise, including the Faculty of Education, Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of Biological and Earth Sciences. The Cretaceous strata are exposed almost horizontally at the site, and in some places, dinosaur fossils are scattered extremely densely per area. After learning how to excavate from their instructors, the participating students were absorbed in carefully digging up the area around the bone fossils. Some students discovered not only parts of the skull, such as teeth and mandibles, but also large fossils such as femurs and iliacs, and carefully excavated the bones while injecting hardening agents. Furthermore, the area around Shartsakh is rich in theropod and sauropod footprints, and the students had the opportunity to see the actual dinosaurs in front of them during lectures and discussions, including learning about the condition of landing surfaces, distinguishing between left and right legs, and estimating the actual size of dinosaurs by measuring stride length. To evaluate the experience program, the five students who participated were given a pre- and post-questionnaire, which revealed that they gave the program an extremely high rating. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the students' experience program and report on its educational effectiveness. The 2017 Elementary School Curriculum Guidelines for Science, "Planning and Handling of Content," not only calls for (3) "enhancing experiential learning activities," but also states in (6) that instruction should be enriched by collaborating with museums and science learning centers, so this experience program is thought to be very suggestive in terms of methodology.
