A passion for learning
07 July 2009
“We are passionate about encouraging the next generation!” That was what David Baker told me at a display of some of this year’s engineering projects at National Instruments.
What David said was not just paying lip-service, as UK’s Academic Programme Manager for NI he has a very real interest in the development of young engineers. There is (arguably) no such thing as true altruism, there is no doubt that in the short term NI would like to sell its hardware and software into academic institutions and in the medium term have the next generation of engineers specify the NI products that they became familiar with at university. However, the company has always been built on raw young talent and the interest in encouraging engineers in their formative years comes across as a very genuine one.
I have seen first hand the use of RoboLAB in schools and witnessed the spark in the eyes of young children when they first realise that solving engineering problems can be fun. RoboLAB is the programmable Lego robot kit that uses NI’s LabVIEW as the graphical programming tool. To make RoboLAB a successful tool in getting children excited about engineering (and science) takes teachers who have the skills and enthusiasm to implement it properly. And, rather sadly, it does seem to be about enthusiasm. Without it teachers are bound to satisfy an overstuffed curriculum and the ‘extras’ like sport, music and science are kept to their regulation minimum and unless a particular willingness emerges to take after school or specialist clubs then these subjects are ignored. As few people who are interested and qualified in science or engineering are also interested in primary school teaching, even excellent tools like RoboLAB can go unappreciated and underused. Meanwhile engineering is ignored and science seems to be largely restricted to some very basic biology. I do feel strongly about this – I have an eleven year old son who could be an engineer in the future, he has a fabulously enquiring mind, but has had little from the education system so far to stimulate it.
If we now fast forward by a decade and to the few who have not slipped through the net. I spent a day with David Baker’s team last week to see some of the projects that have been used stimulate team building, invention, clever use of state-of-the-art technologies and products and, most of all, enthusiasm for the students and graduates in their early 20s to continue a career in engineering. David explained that this is very much the focus for the academic division of his company in the UK, even though the schools programme is very much alive.
The project teams were made up NI recruits in their first year or two mixed in with some ‘interns’ who have spent a year out of their studies for work experience with NI. The results were hugely impressive. Admittedly the real-life applications of some of the projects was questionable, like automating a performance of a Playstation music game or solving a marble maze completely automatically, but the object was more to ‘cultivate engineers and develop them into the leaders of the future’, as David said. Unsurprisingly the technologies used were largely in NI product portfolio, particularly PXI and LabVIEW.
A demo video of a couple of the projects are already on You Tube for those who are interested with the others to follow soon.
My only conclusions are that I feel increasingly that schools are not doing enough to create interest in science and engineering, but with good further education establishments and companies like National Instruments, those who are truly drawn to engineering and who have a natural aptitude for it will find there is still a route to this most rewarding of careers.
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