ICCT, Interactive Course for Control Theory
Interactive Course for Control Theory (ICCT) is an Erasmus + Strategic Partnership for higher education project carried out by University of Ljubljana (UL), University of Pisa (UNIPI), University of Rijeka Faculty of Engineering (UNIRI) and Budapest University of Technology and Economics (UNIBU). Learning control theory in an interactive way is the aim of the project, and its main output is an online, Python-based, interactive course for learning/teaching Control Theory.
Based on the surveys carried out each year as part of the internal evaluation of lecturers at various universities, the conclusion can be drawn that students often have some kind of dissatisfaction with courses related to Control Theory. As an improvement of this situation an idea to create an interactive course was born.
First, in order to check students' opinion about such a course a survey was conducted with two main questions: 1. How would you rate the difficulty of Control Theory in relation to other courses?, and 2. What is/would be your preferred way of studying it? The results of the survey clearly show that students find Control Theory difficult in comparison with other courses. It also shows that an interactive course would be their preferred way of studying it. As no such course is available, the idea of an Erasmus+ project entitled: "Interactive Course for Control Theory" was born.
Control Theory is built on the knowledge gained in various previous courses: Mathematics, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Programming, etc. The staff of the partners which will take part in the project also cover various fields (UL-Mechanical Engineering, UNIPI-Manufacturing, UNIBU-Electrical Engineering and Robotics and UNIRI-Computer Engineering). So, each of the partners will be able to contribute to the Interactive Course from its own point of view.
Basic information
Research activities were related to the identification of the most suitable platform for developing and presenting the developed interactive contents covering control theory, development of the actual framework for the course, preparation of testing of the developed interactive course among its users and analysis of the results. The outcomes of these activities are available in separate reports.
The project offers two results, a Python-based interactive course for control theory that gathers examples from mathematical background, time-domain, frequency-domain and state space, and the accompanying handbook. This course enables students to interact with the presented systems by changing various parameters associated with them and monitor the responses of these systems in real time. Interaction is enabled by buttons, sliders, text boxes, interactive plots and other widgets.
Linear Control Theory: An accompanying handbook for the Interactive Course for Control Theory supports the course and provides some additional examples as well as the underlying theory of the interactive examples.
Both results are intended for both teachers and students