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Originally Posted by eugenebrooks
... In doing this the students learn something that is applicable to their future college experience ... I don't see the value in students learning a proprietary programming system that they may never see again.
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Funny you should say that. I am going on 5 years as a mentor with LASA Robotics (FRC418) and we've graduated on average 10 team members each season, with most of them being spread into the wind to different engineering institutions. The result is always the same. Here's a snippet from an e-mail I received TODAY from a team member that went to the Illinois Institute of Technology -
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"I thought you'd get a kick out of this. The first experiment in my mechanical engineering course was to test the average force of a rocket motor. We used LabVIEW.  "
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This isn't by accident. CalTech has a "National Instruments" laboratory. The University of Colorado at Boulder uses LabVIEW in its labs. The University of Texas uses LabVIEW extensively in its EE programs. Virginia Tech uses LabVIEW Real-Time in its Robotics labs and as the foundation of the programming software in their humanoid robots. If I were in the Academic group I could go on for hours telling you about the Universities and Institutions around the world that are using LabVIEW.
When I watch the Discovery Channel, and they show the researchers working with their equipment, I have a hard time NOT seeing a National Instruments PXI or cRIO system as the controller for their experiments. The readout screens they put up on the TV are LabVIEW screens. At NASA and JPL they use LabVIEW quite extensively. CERN is a big customer of National Instruments hardware, it's being used in their SuperCollider project. Lockheed Martin uses LabVIEW Real-Time in a lot of their test and measurement systems. In Germany the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics uses LabVIEW Real-Time to control the flow of plasma in several of their advanced experiments. You should watch the NI-Week 2007 keynotes that are archived on the NI website, it's really eye-opening.
I can almost say that if you work for a big company and you don't see LabVIEW somewhere, you're not looking hard enough. If you go to a school and are in an ME, EE, or CmpE program, and you don't see LabVIEW, go back tomorrow and check again. There's no shortage of the need for experienced LabVIEW programmers, but last time I checked more and more schools are dropping C programming for JAVA...
-Danny