Get inspired. Watch how engineering students from around the world unleash innovation and do engineering with NI LabVIEW and other NI product solutions. See how you can use LabVIEW to engineer a better world too.

Discover what LabVIEW can do for your test, control, and embedded design applications.Using NI LabVIEW, professors can easily create materials to effectively teach engineering topics, including circuits and controls. With LabVIEW, you can acquire and output real-world signals, analyze data for meaningful information; develop embedded or autonomous systems; and share results using displays, reports, and the Web. Watch this webcast to learn the fundamentals of graphical programming and discover how LabVIEW can benefit your applications by providing data acquisition and signal generation; signal processing and analysis; connectivity with third-party hardware and software; and desktop, embedded, and industrial deployment.

NI is hard at work enabling young people to learn about science, math, and engineering via LabVIEW with products Lego WeDo and Mindstorms, as well as sponsorship and involvement in the FIRST Robotics Competitions.  In addition to doing a great thing by helping young people learn, the side effect is that LabVIEW was squeezed into universities.  I’ll explain.

LabVIEW has been highly successful in industry, where it really has become a tool of choice for engineers who need to automate test, measurement, and control applications.  Additionally, the NI platform is well poised to be a tool of choice for system design, development, and deployment, as industry sees that the graphical approach, with a fully integrated tool-chain, just makes a lot of sense (because it saves time and money).

However, universities and engineering schools are very entrenched in both older (and freely available, open) technologies.  These academic institutions currently feel the top-down weight of industry demanding engineers who are proficient in LabVIEW and will soon feel the bottom-up swell of myriad youngsters who learned LabVIEW while playing with the Lego WeDo and Mindstorms and then participating in FIRST Robotics Competitions.

Now, I don’t want to undermine what an incredible thing NI is doing by helping educate our youngsters, using LabVIEW — I’m just saying that it’s a pretty smart move! 🙂

Author: Jennifer Lewin