TEACHING CONTROL ENGINEERING USING A COMPLEMENTARY SOFTWARE

Nowadays, automatic control and its applications appear in many scientific and industrial fields; hence automatic control course is introduced as a mandatory course in many engineering disciplines. The goal of this course is to provide basic concepts of control engineering and to develop control system analysis and synthesis skills. Failure in achieving educational goals of automatic control results in both educational and job market losses for students. This paper proposes a new method based on MATLAB to enhance automatic control learning. A software based on MATLAB is developed which contains a number of complementary automatic control problems and examples. The developed software has a graphical interface that facilitates the learning process. The effectiveness of the software is investigated trough a survey. Results of the survey show that the software has an outstanding effect on teaching performance. Moreover, according to the results, students evaluated the software as being very easy to use.