Coaching FIRST Lego League

The mission of FIRST Lego League is to inspire youth though hands-on STEM learning. That mission is facilitated through participation in the FIRST Lego League program, which guides youth through STEM learning and exploration at an early age. First Lego League’s youngest group, called “Explore,” is for elementary grades one through three. So this year, my seven-year-old son was finally old enough to join and we immediately signed him up. Shortly after, the school started to send emails requesting volunteers to coach teams.

Brainless LabVIEW Programming: CLA Summit 2016

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One of the presentations I attended at this years Certified LabVIEW Architects summit was given by Darren Nattinger of National Instruments. Darren is a Principal Engineer in LabVIEW R & D. One of the many things he’s responsible for is getting the Quick Drop feature added to LabVIEW. His presentation was titled, ”An End to Brainless LabVIEW Programming”.

Reflections on LabVIEW from a New Software Developer

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Until about a month ago, all of my experience writing code had been with text-based languages like C and Java. I had mostly written code to command microcontrollers or for signal processing. C allowed me a very procedural view of how the microcontroller would execute the code. One line of code could tell the microcontroller to turn on an LED and the next could tell it to turn the LED off, and the microcontroller would always execute the first line first and the second line second. Then I started at DISTek and learned how to code in LabVIEW. LabVIEW is quite the departure from text-based languages. I would like to describe how LabVIEW compares to text-based languages and some of my experiences learning LabVIEW as a new software developer.