Austin, TX. Industry needs more engineers than universities are producing, according to Miroslav Begovic, department head, ECE, Texas A&M University. Speaking at NIWeek, he said, “Our goal is an initiative to have 25,000 engineering students on campus by the year 2025. This is a major transformational education initiative that is supposed to provide opportunities for many more people and while doing so we are trying to maintain and improve the quality and give those students the level of preparation that will let them hit the ground running.”
Texas Instruments supports this initiative. “We have a great collaboration with Texas A&M where we seek to prepare students for the complexities they will face when they enter the workforce,” said Kyle Flessner, vice president, technology and manufacturing at TI, also speaking at NIWeek.
Begovic said the university is finishing a new engineering building that will add a half million square feet of mostly undergraduate instructional and laboratory space.
But additional space is only part of the problem. Also of concern is what students learn. Power management is a TI specialty, and Flessner said, “We believe power management is underrepresented in the undergraduate curriculum.”
To that end, TI for the past three years or so has been working on a power-management lab kit that provides students with access to TI technology. “The goal of this was to give the instructors the ability to teach advanced power-management concepts, typically at the graduate level and perhaps the senior level as well,” Flessner said. “Texas A&M is already utilizing this power-management lab kit as part of [its] curriculum.”
But, said, Flessner, TI really wanted to interact with students earlier in their engineering curriculum. “So we designed a separate application board that we were able to integrate with NI’s ELVIS platform,” Flessner said. “The benefit to that is TI gets to focus on our expertise of power management, and NI gets to focus on [its] expertise in instrumentation, and Texas A&M gets to focus on [its] expertise in instruction and curriculum.”
Elvis stands for Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite, and at NIWeek, NI introduced the new Elvis III version, which combines instrumentation, embedded FPGA design, and web-based access to measurements and curriculum to create a collaborative, active learning environment in the laboratory, studio, and flipped classrooms. With application boards designed by educators and industrial partners like TI, NI ELVIS III expands the NI ELVIS platform to serve a greater set of course topics across electrical and mechanical engineering. Students can benefit from the easy-to-use, yet advanced, capabilities to work on challenging assignments and gain the necessary skills to design, build and test their projects.
“Our collaboration with NI to advance project-based learning using NI ELVIS III is the next step in empowering professors and students and transforming engineering education,” said Flessner.
To learn more about the new NI ELVIS III, visit ni.com/ni-elvis.
