Enhancing student learning: On-line interactive laboratory for modelling of real world control system applications

Abstract

Teaching an introductory course on control systems to undergraduate students often seeks elaborations on real engineering world control system applications to assist students in grasping theoretical concepts. In this paper, the newly developed animated and interactive control systems tutorials are presented. The paper shows that this teaching approach helps students in bridging the gap between the classical control techniques and the real world applications. The course evaluations undertaken since the time of the inclusion of the animated tutorials into the teaching process clearly show the learning improvement gained, reflected in increased average scores, and reduced course fail grade.