Despite the possibilities technology has opened up for ordinary people in the last few years, the world remains a divided place. Nowhere is this divide more glaring than in educational institutions. Understandably, engineering colleges and institutions that are given university status don't have the luxury of buying expensive research equipments their students need to train on.
A good example perhaps is LabView (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench), a visual programming language used widely for industrial automation. LabView is the flagship product of Texas-based National Instruments (NI), which has been widely used by scientists and researchers to translate designs into products (using the software tool on the PC).
Sold mostly for large, multi-national R&D firms, LabView has naturally been priced high like any high-end tool and has been available mostly in a few top level educational institutions. The situation is however changing as NI has been focussing more in recent years on equipping smaller institutions and has come out with a new initiative that would put an end to lack of accessibility.
"If smaller institutions find investing on the technology as something beyond their means, we must make it affordable to them," insisted Victor Mieres, NI's Vice President-sales, Asia Pacific, who was in Bangalore to launch their initiative called Planet NI (NI stands for Nurturing Innovation), under which the company would work out ways to make technology accessible to students and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
"Because in India, there are a lot of engineering students passing out of these institutions to join the industry (particularly R&D departments) and need practical, hands on training on the tools to be successful at their work place", Mieres adds.
As for universities, addressing the accessibility problem seems straight forward: handing out the modular instrumentation/measurement devices along with software tools like LabView. Mieres, however, assures that this isn't easy as it sounds. "These are used extensively in research and so, people who handle this in universities like teachers may not exactly know how to demonstrate its advantages to their students," he says.
So NI is training teachers under the `Train the trainers' programme. Professors from various universities are invited to work in NI's research labs in an initiative called "Professor internship".
Not losing sight of the overall objective of promoting STEM education, the company has set up around 400 centres of excellence - a kind of turnkey labs with its instrumentation devices and learning manuals - in 240 institutions across the country. It is also sponsoring student projects. One of them, done with the automobile company Reva and Robert Bosch, has helped students to design a hybrid car which runs on biofuel and electricity (called Chimera). NI is also releasing textbooks on its visualisation programme and on the concept of instrumentation.
Though much of it is on-going, NI has brought all of them under one umbrella, consolidating and concretising the activities and setting tangible goals. With Planet NI, the company believes it will be easier to widen the initiative and allow its partners and others in the industry to contribute. "Improving the standards of STEM education is vital not only for us, but also for the rest of the industry," points out Jayaram Pillai, NI's Managing Director for INDRA (India, Russia and Arabia) region. "So, we are looking for partners and collaborators who can join us in this initiative."
