Interactivity in Automatic Control Education

Looking back thirty years ago, the advances in teaching have accompanied the technology evolution. As soon as the technology progressed, new teaching tools began to appear. This work describes one of these technological advances, Interactivity. Several definitions of Interactivity are presented from different points of view. Afterwards, the influence of Interactivity on teaching is discussed presenting the advantages and drawbacks of this information methodology on education. The Automatic Control Education field is one of the areas where Interactivity has had a major influence. Hence, this works also describes why Interactivity is very important in engineering education, focusing in the Automatic Control field and presenting some interactive tools as examples of this fact.