Getting High School Teachers Ready for September to Teach with Multisim

[Bhavesh]

Hi All!

So on my latest set of adventures, I made my way to Chicago to attend the annual Project Lead the Way (PLTW) meeting. PLTW is an incredibly innovative organization, which makes working with them awesome! They create technical and scientific curricula that is incorporated at the high school level. High school teachers from around North America become Master Teachers of the PLTW content, and are able to teach students the fundamentals of a number of topics including electrical engineering. Looking at their content, it is amazing what high-school kids are able to learn now. 10 years ago, as I was graduating, I did not have the opportunity to get the leg-up that a program like PLTW provides. I can't wait to see more of the graduates of this program coming through the ranks of the premier engineering schools here in North America (including my alma mater the University of Waterloo).

I was at the PLTW training session to show off some of the great new features of the Programmable Logic Design (PLD) schematic in Multisim. For academic users of Multisim 11.0, you will have begun to see this new feature that allows you to generate raw VHDL directly from Multisim that can be used to program a FPGA (on board the NI Digital Electronics FPGA Board). With this new feature you do not need to simulate a design in Multisim, and then recreate the same schematic in a tool such as that from Xilinx. Instead you can simply use your Multisim representation to program a FPGA. This makes life much easier, as the teacher can focus on educating students on the theory (instead of how to use multiple tools), and the student can get programming much quicker!

The teachers at PLTW were enthusiastic about this new feature, and I can't wait to hear more about their experiences as the new school year begins in September. It was worth the sleepless night from San Jose to Chicago to meet with these Master Teachers last Saturday.

Till next time!

Bhavesh