Enhancing control engineering education using a CACSD didactic environment

The classical approaches to teach the control systems present drawbacks, such as: (i) the general overview of the problem is sometimes underemphasized by the knowledge acquisition; (ii) they mainly use the academic examples that are only dealing with simple concepts and problems; (iii) laboratory experiments are either simple or under developed. Design aspects of control systems when applied to practical processes are important to improve the knowledge of the students and to motivate the utilization of modern methodologies as an emergent technology for the applications in industry. In this work, we point out some important aspects for conceiving a new educational product. We describe our experiences in creating a didactic environment for teaching and learning the control theories in engineering courses based on CACSD (computer aided control system design) and its extension to the research field of industrial problems. Two distinct proposals arise from these experiences for reducing the gap between the theoretical and practical classes, and for teaching the control systems development cycle using mathematical tools and real plants under the virtual instrumentation concept.