Educational Games in Control

Basic control courses are often attended by students from many different study programs. Many of these students are mainly interested in solving practical problems, whereas the lecturer usually aims at teaching profound knowledge of the analysis and control of dynamical systems. This gap between the application-oriented expectation of the learner and the theoryfocused material chosen by the lecturer may end up in a considerable demotivation of the students, which in turn lowers their learning performance. One way to close this gap and to increase both motivation and learning performance are educational games. This is shown in this paper exemplarily for two educational games that were introduced in a basic automatic control course at the University of Stuttgart. Both games are presented in detail and compared based on the course evaluations and feedback from our students.