Abstract:

Control systems teaching at undergraduate engineering academic programs needs, in order to allow the students to understand how these systems work, a practical focus that complements the theoretical aspects. Such practice should encourage to apply that knowledge to real world situations and to analyze the obtained results, which must be a very important competence for their professional careers. However, building a set of practical exercises based on physical systems is not always an easy task, since they must lay in some educational platform that must stand a wide set of requirements. From a logistics point of view, such platform should be easy to use, cheap, and robust enough to bear an intensive use by non expert users; from an educational point of view, it should favor that the students fill the gap between control systems theory and control systems real world problems and it also should be appealing for the students in order to enhance their motivation; furthermore, the platform must be flexible in order to allow a variety of different practical exercises that cover as much as possible the theoretical aspects of these courses.

We present in this work the preliminary results of an Educational Innovation Project that we are currently developing at Málaga University (Spain). This project focuses on the use of the well-known LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotic platform for teaching LTI control systems theory at different undergraduate levels of Computer Science and Telecomunnication engineering programs. We have designed a set of control systems practical exercises that can be easily developed in the NXC programming language (a free subset of C including an API for managing the LEGO NXT), without changing the firmware or the physical configuration of the robot, and using a free multi-platform IDE. Along with these exercises, we have also compiled a variety of internet resources to consult, and both exercises and resources are available for the students via the Moodle-based virtual campus at the Málaga University. We have tested these practices in a voluntary workshop and in an ordinary one-semester course, getting an enthusiastic response from the students -that we have measured via different anonymous evaluation questionnaires-, as well as good academic results; besides, we have also worked on how this kind of practical approach may be combined with collaborative work activities, like wikis or other collaborative work, available too in the Moodle platform through some of its web components. Finally, we are currently developing a common repository of practices, in order to reuse them among the teachers involved in this educational innovation project.

With this foundational work during the past 2008-2009 academic year, in the following 2009-2010 period we plan to extend the application of this practices to more subjects, to improve and look for new collaborative work techniques, and to increase if possible the number or practical exercises. This includes to extend the use of LEGO NXT to control systems courses with a large number of students.

Keywords:

lego mindstorms nxt, control systems engineering, innovative education.