Take-home lab kits for system dynamics and controls courses

Laboratories are an essential component of system dynamics and controls education yet traditional laboratories are costly and require considerable space. In this project, we are piloting the concept of distributed laboratories in the form of kits that students take home and work on much like a problem set. Two kits have been developed, a mass-spring-damper system and an analog filter system. The home PC provides the needed computational horsepower for experiment control, data collection and analysis while an inexpensive microcontroller handles real-time control tasks. Twenty-five kits were constructed and piloted in an undergraduate systems course.