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LabVIEW
Creating Community
This is an ambitious plan, but you have to first ask yourself a few questions:
- Has your school, university or institution a LabVIEW site license? If you qualify, the educational prices are yearly subscriptions, but substantially discounted, so it should not really be a financial problem. Getting a qualified quote and purchasing order through the current NI system may be however a bigger problem, also depending on where you are in the world.
The Community Edition is fine for your students to install on their own computer to do home hobby projects or other home work, but you can not use it in any class or course setup. That is explicitly mentioned in the license conditions.
- Your enthusiasm about LabVIEW is really refreshing. I share the same feelings, coming from an electrical engineering background, it struck me as the ideal way of expressing programming problems when I first encountered it 30 years ago. But don't expect many other people to feel the same right away, although if you teach in an electrical engineering place, where students are already familiar with electrical schemata, that percentage may be considerably higher.
- The entire exercise will likely hinge around one or more teachers, professors or instructors being enthusiastic about this endeavour. Preparing some course work shouldn't be extremely difficult. NI has various course materials, that while not directly usable in a normal class setup, may definitely give you a good guideline how to structure your own course. Before letting students do some real projects, you definitely want them to run through some sorts of LabVIEW Basic knowledge course. LabVIEW is pretty much unique in the world about expressing programming constructs. So it needs some getting used too. Even with my enthusiasm back then about having finally found the right tool that let me concentrate on solving the actual programming problems rather than having to worry about setting a semicolon at every end of a statement and using the right assignment operator, or spelling variable names correctly and all those other pesky textual programming details, I only really was able to start using LabVIEW effectively after attending 3 full days of the LabVIEW Basic course. And LabVIEW today is much much broader and has many more possibilities than it had 30 years ago in version 2.2.1 on a Mac II.
- Then organizing a user group of some sorts at your school or place. I would try to be not too ambitious about that right away. Start small and adapt it to the IT facilities that your institution can provide. Then grow from there as the interest increases. You likely will want to first get some basic infrastructure going such as introductory courses to get the students familiar with the LabVIEW way. From there you can then start possibly regular meetings, with presentations, projects and discussions. Once you get a few students who are able and willing to present about topics they have worked on or researched for a particular project, you have a healthy base that can start running on its own without you driving it completely alone.
Don't forget to mention this site as a resource! It would be nice if we (as individuals) had access to this site. I would probably end up patrolling the community, and maybe some others here might, as well.
