LabVIEW Can Save Engineering, and the Children (with your help)

By now, you’ve probably read or heard about the crisis of science and engineering education in the United States – our kids are too busy playing video games and surfing the web to get interested in science and engineering in school.   Although it’s refreshing to hear the candidates in the current Presidential election talk about the importance of science and engineering to be a key economic driver to solve the big challenges of the 21^st century – alternative energy sources, healthcare, and infrastructure – these all feel like huge issues that will play out for decades.

Here is something that you can do yourself, right in your own community.  The FIRST robotics organization’s decision to use CompactRIO and LabVIEW as a robotics platform has been well-chronicled.   However, now the teams are getting close to receiving their kit of equipment, and they might be able to benefit from someone who knows LabVIEW already being there as a mentor to get them up and going.  It’s a really cool way to try to get kids turned on to engineering.  You can share your LabVIEW expertise with these teams online, help out with a weekend training session, or help mentor a team – visit www.ni.com/first to learn more.

Both Lego and NI can play an important role in that effort, because kids need to see, touch, and feel the concepts of science and engineering in action to get them tap into their curiosity and get them truly excited.  I remember the first time the light went on for me – unfortunately it was long after the four years of drudgery and theory I slogged through to get my BSEE degree.  On my first week on the job at NI, I very clearly remember hooking up a thermocouple to a DAQ board and writing a program to measure temperature.  It was really cool plotting the data and calculating a bunch of statistics and being able to see the values move as we played around with the sensors.  And then acquiring some higher-speed signals and putting the nyquist theorem and our signal processing classes to work really started to make things click.  Simple, I know – but the point where the physical world of sensors and actuators intersect with the virtual world of computers is when science and engineering come alive. 

My 4^th grade daughter just finished her Robolab session in school – and now we are going to start building robots with Lego Mindstorms and LabVIEW together at home.  She seems genuinely excited to keep playing around with it – lucky for her, she “got it” a lot earlier than I did. 

Visit our website to learn how you might be able to help out a FIRST Robotics team near you this year.