Some thoughts on the first course in control engineering

The paper discusses aspects related to the teaching and content of a first course in control engineering, assumed to be primarily on classical control. It is postulated that the objective of such a course should be to produce students who can design controllers to meet realistic practical specifications. It is argued that this in many cases is an iterative process and students should be allowed to use modern software to do this. It is further argued that these procedures should be used in examinations as current approaches do not provide realistic design questions and are more a test of the student's mathematical ability than their capability in control design.