In another of our regular features on "doing well out of doing good." National Instruments and FIRST Robotics have done the expected (at least by me, anyway).
With National Instruments' flagship, Labview, as the engine for the Lego Mindstorm robots that are the precursor to FIRST Robotics (younger kids do Lego League, older kids graduate to FIRST), it makes sense to use Labview and National Instruments controllers for the upper division of the competition as well. The students already have a feel for Labview programming from Mindstorms, and will have a leg up on programming their FIRST competition robots. And of course, by the time they're 18 and out of high school, they'll have four to six years of detailed exposure to the National Instruments culture.