One day hands-on workshop on LabVIEW and Data Acquisition at Republic Polytechnic

A one day hands-on workshop on LabVIEW and Data Acquisition was conducted on 9 Nov 2005 at Republic Polyechnic for the members of the Medical Interest Group. The attendees were 20 2nd year Engineering Students. The course material used was the instruction guide Building the Light Intensity Data Logger.

One of the distinguishing features of Republic Polytechnic's education system is its unique adaptation of Problem Based Learning. Republic Polytechnic's pedagogical approach is based on learning by doing. Furthermore, students solve problems, seek information, submit assignments using their personal notebooks through the wireless IT infrastructure of the campus. The workshop was conducted by distributing the DAQ Training Kit hardware and letting the students download the materials, install the software and learn at their own pace and through peer learning.

Some comments from the students after the workshop

"Well, I would recommend people this workshop for various reasons. First off is that if they want to pick up something new, this workshop would be good as it is also beneficial towards their future in things like the Final Year Project. People had always thought of programming as boring, tiresome source code writing and debugging. But this course brings them to a new level. Gone are memorizing source codes, figuring out what goes on line by line and looking at a pile of words to find your error. With the graphical nature of LabView, things are simplified a lot."

"You can learn what labview is and how to build it. I think labview is easier than microcontroller. Because if u can understand what does this icon use, then u can try to design and run it. With micro u need to know codes, but labview doesn't need to know codes. You can only focus on how to build the circuit. And mathematic skill, analogue, digital and circuit Analysis, all of these knowledge and skill must use during u use LabView. Labview base on the real life, and the case is come from real life. It is more useful for engineer to design a new produce and improve our life."

"The instructions was easy to follow once you got the hang of it. It was a clear cut one. Overall, I think that this workshop is not that bad. I give 8 out of 10. I know that this will help and be useful to us for our final year project next year. So I don't mind knowing more about it."

"I think today's lesson was very interesting. We can control electronic devices using our programme. The programme we did today can be applied in our real life which is very interesting."

"This workshop is totally different from other workshop. This workshop emphasises on both practical and theory and most of other workshop only emphasise on one. In fact we can gain valuable knowledge on the software"

"Today's workshop is quite interesting, I have known some new concept about the programming, although it very different compare to traditional programming language. I think it very easy to understand for a rookie, it simplify the process of programming, they designer can pay more attention on design."

"The programming we learned about is very different from the ones we learn from school as the one we used to learn ss that we need to typed in long and boring source codes. But in this case the program we used is like Orcad which is just drag and put in it so it is more fun. And the device we programmed is fun."

"During the workshop we get to learn new things. Not like usual programming that we need to type all the codes and commands, we are using graphics to do the programming. Its like drawing a flow chart. It is a very fun experience. Actually it is not difficult to understand or use it. Very simple, just like drawing, we are able to group things together and able to draw wire. Thus when get used to using the program we can actually do a lot of things with it."