Hardware-based activities for flipping the system dynamics and control curriculum

The advent of new software tools and the rapidly declining cost of hardware have changed the nature of what is required of the modern engineer. These changes require modifications to the curriculum, but also provide a new set of tools to help students learn. The work of this paper outlines some hardware-based activities that have been developed and piloted at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) with the purpose of transforming the way system dynamics and control courses are taught to make them more effective and relevant to today´s engineering students. These activities offer the promise to improve student understanding of the underlying theory, while exposing students to some practical considerations related to control system design and implementation. The activities that have been developed have been designed to be relatively inexpensive and to require minimal additional instruction for students to carry out. These goals were sought in order to allow the activities to be performed during a short class period (such as in an inverted course), or to be performed outside of class as part of a homework assignment, such that additional courses would not need to be added to an already crowded curriculum. The experiments that have been developed specifically rely on inexpensive Arduino hardware and MATLAB/Simulink software.