102 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 46, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2003 ACES: An Interactive Software Platform for Self-Instruction and Self-Evaluation in Automatic Control Systems Vassilios Petridis, Spyros Kazarlis, and Vassilis George Kaburlasos Abstract—This paper presents an interactive-, menu-driven prototype software platform, namely automatic control educational software (ACES), for self-instruction and self-evaluation in auto- matic control systems. ACES is used for enriching instruction in automatic control at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The ACES platform includes theory with hyperlinks, a concept-graph, and a database with exercises. Students’ answers to exercises are evaluated automatically “on-line.” Furthermore, exercises can be proposed automatically by ACES. An instructor/supervisor can support in person the learning effort of a student, monitor the progress of a student, and, also, tailor a course’s contents on the modular ACES platform. Two statistical hypothesis tests on both attitude questionnaires and student marks in the final (written) exam confirmed that the employment of ACES in the educational process can improve the performance of students in an automatic control course although the attitude of students toward the course does not change significantly with the use of ACES. Index Terms—Control systems education, HTML, interactive educational software, self-evaluation, self-instruction. I. INTRODUCTION D IFFERENT authors have recognized that engineering ed- ucation is not keeping up with the rapid changes that take place in the practice of engineering [1]. Moreover, the IEEE Ed- ucation Society has acknowledged that this is a period of rapid change in engineering education, especially at the undergrad- uate level [2]. Lately, the ever increasing power and availability of com- puters, including the availability of both hardware and software has encouraged efforts to use computers to enhance traditional ways of delivering education [3]. In this vein, the European Union has launched a number of research projects for the de- velopment of information technologies for learning and training [4]. This work describes a prototype software platform for deliv- ering undergraduate education on automatic control systems. More specifically, the automatic control educational software platform (ACES) has been developed for self-instruction and self-evaluation as detailed here. ACES is used in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Manuscript received March 31, 2002; revised April 11, 2002. The authors are with Division of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle Univer- sity of Thessaloniki (AUTh), GR-54006 Thessaloniki, Greece (e-mail: petridis@vergina.eng.auth.gr). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TE.2002.808266 Thessaloniki, Greece, since 1999. Preliminary results have been presented in [5]. In electrical engineering various computer-assisted learning applications have been reported for various courses, including circuit analysis [6], discrete-time systems [7], etc. Regarding automatic control, in particular, instruction at an undergraduate level is a challenging task because of the fairly high mathemat- ical contents, which should bear, however, an immediate prac- tical utility [8]. With the advent of World Wide Web (WWW) new oppor- tunities arose for delivery of education. For instance, hyper- text markup language (HTML) provides a mechanism for al- lowing media rich representations to be made on the WWW, and methods for developing hypertext learning courses have been reported [9]. Regarding automatic control in particular, an overview on Controls Education on the Web has been presented in [10]. Interactive-learning software tools for automatic control courses have been developed in HTML [11]. Likewise, the work in [12] presents an interactive software tool for iterative root locus and Bode plot control system classroom design. Another educational software package for teaching automatic control via the web is described in [13]. Also, the work in [14] describes a new technology that uses the web to teach feedback control; in particular, a user can modify interactively a controller for a he- licopter model located remotely. To advance the state-of-the-art in computer-assisted delivery of education in automatic control at undergraduate level, the ACES software platform has been developed as detailed here. The layout of this paper is as follows. Section II presents gen- eral characteristics of the software platform ACES. Section III describes technically in detail the various software components of ACES. Section IV discusses practical issues pertaining to employment of ACES and an example of using ACES is demonstrated. Section V presents a statistical assessment of ACES. Section VI concludes by summarizing the contribution of this paper including potential future work. Three short Appendixes A–C provide specific technical details. II. ACES CHARACTERISTICS A user-friendly software platform, that is ACES, was devel- oped in modules so as to facilitate maintainability. Seeking for a longer-term employment of ACES via WWW, most software modules of ACES have been developed in the HTML program- ming language, and some in Visual C++. Moreover ACES runs 0018-9359/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE