Virtual interactive systems for control education

Advances in computers and software have made it possible to construct a new generation of teaching tools for automatic control. These tools have a position somewhere between ordinary laboratory processes and conventional computational tools. The idea is to have a multiple-view representation of a system and some of its attributes available on the computer screen. The objects can be manipulated directly, and relations between the objects are maintained during the manipulation. We call these tools virtual processes or virtual systems. These tools are well suited to describe abstract notions, but they can also represent problems normally dealt with in the laboratory. This paper outlines the ideas and gives a couple of illustrations.