Innovations in undergraduate control education

The year 2004 represents the 50th anniversary of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). While the official celebration of this milestone is deferred to the December issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine (CSM), this penultimate anniversary year issue looks firmly into the future of control. In particular, the current issue is devoted to control education at the undergraduate level. We can think of no more fitting topic for a mid-centennial celebration. In the January 2004 E-letter, we published a CSM call for papers on innovations in undergraduate control education, casting a wide net to capture whatever might be conceived of as a relevant innovation. We excluded graduate and professional education (reserving that important area for a future project) and mentioned course and curriculum development, experimental facilities, laboratory development , student projects, and classroom lecture material. We also included K–12 activities because of their effect on stimulating undergraduate interest in systems and control. Despite a short lead time, CSM received more than 60 submissions , and slightly less than half of those were ultimately accepted. With more articles than can be published in the current issue, additional articles will appear in future issues. We have loosely arranged the articles into several categories , namely, K–12 education, course and curriculum development, experiment development, special projects, software and laboratory development, and lecture material. The current issue encompasses the first four categories.