Presenting Information about LabVIEW during the ASEE Midwest Conference
Author: Jackson Marsh | Major: Mechanical Engineering | Semester: Fall 2022
My name is Jackson Marsh, and I am a junior mechanical engineer major, minoring in mathematics. This semester I was able to attend and present at the American Society for Engineer Education (ASEE) Midwest Section Conference. My presentation at this conference was to present my idea for implementing Arduino and LabVIEW into lab course curriculum for mechanical engineering students. The driving ideas for this work came when working as a research assistant, and I had devoted time to learning these technologies instead of the research at hand.
While working throughout the summer as a research assistant I continued to run into problems using the data acquisition systems I had been supplied. At first, I thought that this was because I had not gotten far enough into the curriculum to have hands on experience with these systems. However, after talking graduate students and other students further along in the curriculum, I noticed that LabVIEW and Arduino barely brushed on throughout the curriculum. Together Stephen Pierson, Christy Dunlap, and I wrote this paper to explain how these systems could be integrated into the already existing curriculum. The paper was accepted to the ASEE Midwest Section Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which allowed me to go and present these ideas to other students, who may be having the same problem, and to faculty at other universities who may have a similar issue in their programs. From this presentation, I received feedback on how other institutions were using these systems in their curriculum. Interestingly, each institution had its own spin on similar ideas. From them I learned how to incorporate Arduino with MATLAB, a program taught early in the mechanical engineering curriculum. This has not only allowed me to look back over this paper, but it has also allowed me to look at my own research and see how I could improve the research I am doing.
The largest takeaways I had from the conference were the skills I learned from presenting and the connections that I made. First, presenting at the conference was very bumpy. While I was confident with what I was saying, behind me my presentation PowerPoint was messing up without me knowing. Because I was using my laptop as a reference for each slide, I did not realize that the aspect ratio on the projector had cut off the edges of my PowerPoint until the third slide. I did not know how to fix this problem on the fly, so I had to rely less on my visual aids and more on what I was saying. Another problem I ran into was a video I had embedded in my video. This was very frustrating because the video was to be used to compare and contrast types of code used for LabVIEW and was one of the largest arguments I had for the incorporation of LabVIEW into curriculum. Even more frustrating was the fact that I had checked the video multiple times. I had tried the video on difference computers and off of a flash drive. However, I was able to push through and narrate what would happen in the video and give a less clear idea of my point. These two things taught me to check what my audience is seeing before jumping right into a presentation. This rough presentation did not stop people from coming up with suggestions and talking to me after my presentation. Through this I was able to connect with multiple graduate school directors and other students. The students shared in similar frustrations to me and we were able to talk about what we had learned on our own.
From what I learned at the conference, I will now be moving on to spread what I have learned. One of these avenues would be via the mechanical engineering YouTube page. My advisor Dr. Hu has talked with me on how I can turn my conference presentation into an informational YouTube video. This way the information would get to students not only at the University of Arkansas but at other institutions.