An Interactivity-Based Methodology to Support Control Education: How to Teach and Learn Using Simple Interactive Tools [Lecture Notes]

Modern engineering projects are multidisciplinary and involve the integration of diverse elements. Within this context, automatic control plays a crucial role. Automatic control is an area of knowledge with significant mathematical content, including differential equations, linear algebra, differential geometry, and/or complex variable among others [1]. Consequently, in many cases, automatic control is difficult for most students to grasp, especially in those cases where students have only an introductory control course in their engineering curriculum. Thus, teachers look for ways to introduce and make automatic control attractive for the students [2]. From the very beginning, graphical representation has been used as support in automatic control teaching. Looking back to the pioneering books in automatic control [3]-[11], it can be seen that there are plenty of schematics and figures. Graphical abstraction was also used to contribute to theoretical understanding [12]. Most of the relevant automatic control concepts, such as systems interconnection, frequency response, stability analysis, time response, and/or root locus, have been displayed graphically [13]. This type of representation has been considered for years as an excellent way to introduce automatic control concepts.