Modern Tools for Development and Design of Virtual Instruments

Engineering education has been changing essentially in the past few years. Curriculums, courses, devices and learning are different. The background of the students today is no more the same as earlier, but the young people also have many new skills and knowledge. Teachers and students can take advantage of the new technologies and methods. All this means challenges to the engineering education. One of the experiments and solutions is the engineering office with Virtual Instrumentation simulations. The software and hardware engineer’s work is designing of new applications by using modern tools for graphical system design. The engineer is the expert “modeler”. The three essential phases in his work are design; evaluating new research algorithms with models and simulations, prototyping; implementing models to the prototypes and integrating them to the hardware, deploying; build prototypes can be scaled to the field as customer devices. In this paper there are some examples of using the virtual instrumentation in the new learning environments. Virtual instrumentation is also model driven development. More generally Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) is an approach for designing and developing the solution directly using the domain concepts. In the future there will also be other more specified environments for learning to build by DSM tools.