Programming from the ground up in control laboratories

This paper describes an innovative educational approach taken at the University of Colorado for teaching a senior-level undergraduate controls course. The students were able to do all of the control system design and programming by themselves using the LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Module. The advantages of this approach over ''canned'' lab approaches are many. The students feel more responsible for the final product and they are able to apply control techniques learned in class in a more fundamentally creative way. We present evidence from the class taught in the fall term, 2005 and 2006, that suggests that students will often use tools from beyond the scope of the class to solve problems in creative and occasionally unexpected ways.