Taking Action: Enhancing Engineering Technology Laboratories With Labview Based Graphical Development Tools

The ever improving technologies raise new challenges for higher education to provide fresh graduates with “ready hands”. To address this concern, four faculty members in the Engineering Technology Department at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) proposed to revamp the current Engineering Technology undergraduate lab courses with the powerful industrial popular graphical development environment – LabVIEW, which has successfully been recognized by sponsor NSF with Grant #0714885. LabVIEW can provide an interactive computer-based instrumentation environment which is realized through the integration of flexible software and modular hardware. Its novelty of virtual instruments makes it a dominant tool for R&D, and also an appropriate training facility for higher education. Engineering Technology is featured with its emphasis on student hands-on skills. This project will cover all the major laboratories in both Electrical Engineering Technology (ELET) and Computer Engineering Technology (CPET) programs, such that students will be consistent in their learning process throughout their undergraduate study. With the recent funding from NSF, we are now in the implementation stage. In the first step, some lab courses have been revamped, and those courses are mainly instructed by the project team. In the next step, the revamping will be extended to the other courses instructed by the other faculties. In addition, this project has leveraged on several other ongoing grants, including an NSF CCLI grant, an Army research grant, as well as a Title III grant. Through such a strategy, all the students will receive enough training on the latest innovative equipment to reach the goals of inspiring students’ interests in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, and strengthening their marketability upon graduation.