Control engineering, system theory and mathematics: the teacher's challenge

Abstract

The principles, difficulties and challenges in control education are discussed and compared to the similar problems in the teaching of mathematics and systems science in general. The difficulties of today's students to appreciate the classical teaching of engineering disciplines, which are based on rigorous and scientifically sound grounds, are discussed. The new demands for modern engineering education assume that the mathematical skills of the students in modelling, analysis, synthesis, simulation and validation of control problems improve significantly, which sets a major challenge to the education system. To meet that challenge new activating teaching methods are needed, which together with traditional studies bring the students closer to practical applications. In the current paper two new teaching methods are presented, which are aimed at bringing the control world near the student more easily than the traditional courses do. These example cases are control courses in the net with self-study sections, interactive repetitive questions, problems with complete solutions (both pen and paper and computer problems). Also, new ‘interactive laboratory exercises’ have been included, where the students prepare their preliminary problems first, and after that test the controller with a real process over the net (from their home or from a computer class).

Keywords:

• Control education
• System theory
• Mathematics
• Problem-based learning
• Problem solving
• Web-course
• Laboratory exercises