Indian Thought Leaders Endorse Experiential Education to Improve the Quality of Engineering Education at National Instruments’ Conference

Indian Thought Leaders Endorse Experiential Education to Improve the Quality of Engineering Education at National Instruments’ Conference

Bangalore, 29 October 2007: At the 6th National Conference on Virtual Instrumentation in Engineering Education” hosted by National Instruments, leaders from academia and industry addressed ways to improve the quality of engineering education. ‘Experiential Education’ was the theme of the free daylong conference focusing on hands on teaching and learning. The event saw participation of over 300 educators and academicians from across engineering colleges in India including IIT, IISc, NIT, VIT, RV College among others.

The conference was inaugurated by the Guest of Honor, Mr. Kaushik Mukherjee, Principal Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Govt of Karnataka, followed by an address by the Chief Guest, Dr R. N. Mathur, Founder President, EQUATE. Mr. Tony Vento, Vice President, Applications Engineering, National Instruments, delivered the keynote address on Experiential Education – the innovative teaching approach that enables applying theoretical concepts to real-world engineering problems, to better equip engineers for the Industry. An expert panel discussion on ‘Experiential Education’ chaired by Dr. C. Mohan, Chief Scientist, IBM India, featured thought leaders from IIT, Intel and SolidWorks.

Jayaram Pillai, Managing Director for India, Russia & Arabia, National Instruments said, “Experiential learning is proven to be the best approach to provide quality education. This is exactly what is accomplished by the National Instruments Academic Program. Laboratory courses and hands-on learning with NI LabVIEW and NI hardware helps students understand the fundamentals thoroughly and become better engineers. With this approach, learning becomes more meaningful and fun.”

The conference ran three parallel tracks of technical sessions on Design, Control and Test featuring presentations by experts from IIT, TVS Motors, SolidWorks, PSG Tech, FCRI, and TIFR, on using the latest in Virtual Instrumentation technology to innovatively teach concepts in test, design and control engineering. The conference attendees also had the opportunity to witness the launch of the latest edition of the LabVIEW software – LabVIEW 8.5; get a sneak peek into the soon to be released book – ‘Control Engineering with LabVIEW’ by Dr. Ram Kalyan, NIT, Trichy; and prize distribution to the winners of VI Mantra 2007 student paper contest.

The vision of Graphical System Design has been driving National Instruments to provide better solutions for Measurement, Automation and Design. Over 200 Virtual Instrumentation labs have been set up in engineering colleges across India including IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, BITS Pilani, VIT, NIT Surathkal, PSG Tech, College of Engineering Pune, Punjab Engineering College, among others. National Instruments technology is used by team to develop a product named WILD (Wheel Impact Load Detector) which will play a major role in ensuring railway safety. National Instruments continuously innovates products which impact the quality of engineering education, the experiential way.

About National Instruments:

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 4,300 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past eight years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

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