Inspiring the next generation of innovators was the theme of the Aug. 8 keynote session of NIWeek. Pernille France, senior director of the LEGO Foundation, said stigma is attached to failure. But, she said, inventors have failed far more than they’ve succeeded, but they have learned from their failures.
In the future, she added, teaching content will not be enough. “We need to teach [students] to learn process skills that will help them come up with surprising and innovative solutions to new problems,” because 65% of children today will grow up to have jobs that haven’t been invented yet. She said that the new MINDSTORMS EV3 platform will “enable students to build, create, program, and fail—and then build, create, program, and succeed.”
David Bocanegra, 10-Year-Old LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Beta Tester
Courtesy of National Instruments
Testifying to the success of the project, 10-year-old beta-tester David Bocanegra took the stage and demonstrated a robotic guard dog that he had built and programmed. He declared the MINDSTORMS EV3 “Awsome!” It lets him get his programming done much faster and is easier to use than the previous version.
National Instruments vice president Ray Almgren discussed NI’s participation in FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) and introduced FRC Team 2468 from Westlake High School in Austin. Team members demonstrated their robot, which could rapidly fire Frisbees at a goal. The team noted its efforts to repay the community for mentoring them by helping mentor middle-school and elementary robotics teams, going so far as to travel to Nigeria to assist a team there.
Leland Melvin, associate administrator of education at NASA, said that although the Space Shuttles have been retired from space, they now have a new mission, providing inspiration in museums. “We must give students what they need to be empowered,” he said, adding that it’s important to give kids the kinds of hands-on activity that will enable them to make connections with the physical world. It takes a village to raise tomorrow’s innovators, and we all should be part of that village, Melvin concluded.
The session then turned to university-level work. Almgren introduced NI myRIO, which lets students learn on the platform they will see in industry.
Professor Marcia O’Malley and students James French and Chad Rose of Rice University described their beta-site use of the new product. Professor O’Malley said she teaches a required mechanical engineering course on system dynamics in which students develop mathematical models of mechanical and electrical systems and learn techniques for solving differential equations and analyzing time-domain response. She noted that students have little real-world experience.
In fact, French commented that last fall the students probably had less LabVIEW programming experience than 10-year-old David. Rose described a centerpiece of the course—a one degree-of-freedom haptic paddle system with the top of the two paddles serving as the user interface.
Students can implement either a master-slave format or a master-master configuration; the latter incorporates bilateral communications, and feedback enables an operator of one paddle to feel what’s happening on the second. Students can change control gains on the fly to see the resulting performance improvements or degradation and study first- and second-order responses.
Dr. Red Whittaker with Griffin
Courtesy of National Instruments
Red Whittaker of CMU and Astrobotic Technology then introduced Griffin, the lander that will deliver a rover to the lunar surface in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. He noted that his team has partnered with NI for LabVIEW FPGA technologies. Whittaker invited attendees on stage to get a close-up view of Griffin, saying, “It’s uncommon that you can step up and touch something that will then fly and be on another planet for eternity.”