Educator’s Day 2008 – A day for the educators by the educators

- Nurturing Innovation and Creativity in Engineering Education

Bangalore, 21st November 2008: At the 7th National Educator’s Day focusing on Nurturing Innovation and Creativity in Engineering (NICE) Education sponsored by National Instruments, leaders from academia and industry addressed ways to improve the quality of engineering education. This time a team of young academicians were on the organizing committee who planned and executed Educator’s Day 2008 successfully.

This Educator’s Day the focus was Graphical System Design, an innovative way to effectively teach and learn engineering concepts. The conference highlighted the importance of improving the teaching methodology and imparting quality education. During this workshop thought leaders from academics and industry shared their experience in working with the students and the teaching-learning methods from an outcome based perspective. As always the objective was practicing experiential education.

The conference was inaugurated by the young academicians who formed the organizing committee. Chief Guest, Er. Anuj Sinha, Head, National Council for Science & Technology Communication (NCSTC), and Guest of honor, Dr. R. Radhakrishnan, VC, Anna University gave a special address on NICE Education.

Jayaram Pillai, Managing Director for IndRA, National Instruments, delivered the keynote address on, ‘Experiential Education using Graphical System Design Tools’ followed by a special address by Ray Almgren, Vice President of Product Marketing and Academic Relations.

Speaking about the organising committee, Mr. Jayaram Pillai, MD, InDRA, National Instruments said, “We can only speak of the educator’s problem, we don’t live their problem. It is the educator’s who can deliver the content more effectively than us. To focus on the current industry needs educators have to nurture innovation. Today these academicians have done a fantastic job.”

“Experiential learning is proven to be the best approach to provide quality education. Our engineers are theoretically good but we have to make them practically better. With experiential education approach learning becomes more interesting and fun. This is exactly what is accomplished by the National Instruments Academic Program. Through such initiatives we want to nurture and develop good engineers,” added Ray Almgren, VP – Product Marketing and Academic Relations.

An expert panel discussion on ‘Creativity for Dummies’ featured experts from Indian Industry and Academia. The event also saw parallel tracks on ‘Electronics, Data Acquisition & Embedded Electronics’ and ‘Control Systems, Robotics & Biomedical’ by leading academicians and industry experts. Graphical System Design enabled live experiments and poster session on VI Mantra, the annual technical paper contest followed.

The event saw participation of over 650, educators and academicians from across engineering colleges in India including IIT, BITS, IISc, NIT, VIT, RV College, PSG Tech, Punjab Engineering College, among others.

The vision of Graphical System Design has been driving National Instruments to provide better solutions for Measurement, Automation and Design. Over 250 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, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, among others. 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 4,800 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past nine years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

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