10th Annual Educators Day emphasizes the need for “Do Engineering”

BANGALORE, INDIA: National Instruments (NI), a technology pioneer and leader in Graphical System Design along with NICE (Nurturing Innovation and Creativity in Education) Committee hosted the 10th Annual Educator’s Day 2011, India’s largest academic platform for science and engineering professors today.

The two-day event was a compelling success with participation of around 1000 students, professors, scholars and eminent academicians across the country. The event focused on the need to ‘Do Engineering’, which plays a pivotal role in enabling students and teachers on the effective use of technology in education.

In the keynote, Jeff Kodosky, NI Business and Technology Fellow, co-founder and “father of LabVIEW” focused on the importance of using the Graphical System Design approach to solve today’s grand challenges for a sustainable future and on the relevance of LabVIEW, as one of the most intuitive programming environment available for engineers and scientists. Addressing the professors, he emphasized on the importance of teaching ‘Do Engineering’ to the students, which will in turn accelerate productivity, innovation and discovery.

Jayaram Pillai, MD, IndRA (India, Russia and Arabia), National Instruments, said: "Engineers should focus on core engineering, which has an immense potential for growth, like IT. With this platform, we are inspiring engineers to ‘Do Engineering’ rather than ‘Learn Engineering’. He spoke about India’s vision 2020 and how we need engineers and scientists to be ready to solve future challenging problems. He further added, “This is only possible with the continuous support of professors to encourage students to DO Engineering and also students should stay true to their core engineering concepts and focus on higher education.”

The highly acclaimed National level technical competitions- NIYANTRA and VIMANTRA staged its Grand Finale on the 13th Oct. The winner of VIMantra for the research category is Pranjal Chaubey from IIT Kanpur for his project on “Design of a data acquisition system”. For the student category the winner is IIT Roorkee for their project on “Virtual Lab”.

NIYantra winner is PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore for their project on “Smart Start Bio-Key system for automated drunken driving prevention”. The winners of NIYANTRA and VIMANTRA competed for prizes worth Rs 3, 50,000, pre-placement interviews and mentorship opportunities at NI India. The winners also stand a chance to get nominated as India's entries in the ‘Global NI Student Design Contest’, an initiative aimed at fostering innovation using the LabVIEW graphical development environment at a global level.

This year, the panel discussions by renowned professors, industry and media professionals gave rise to insights and views on the challenges in teaching engineering and motivating students in pursuing core engineering. The discussions were focused around a wide range of next generation embedded technologies including design track, green engineering, teaching embedded systems, robotics and mechatronics, nanotechnology and more to emphasize the importance of Graphical System Design.