A new web–based tool for education and automatic evaluation in Control Systems Engineering

In this paper we present a web–based innovative education tool designed for automating the collection, evaluation and error detection in practical exercises assigned to Control Engineering students. The system is implemented on a Apache–PHP–MySQL database–driven server and uses Matlab to compare, on one hand the solutions provided by students (by executing their code) with the correct solutions in order to automatically give a grade. The proposed system is also able to individually parameterize the exercises for each student. By using a student–code execution architecture, the limitations of multiple-choice tests in practical exercises are overcome. The open platform allows a professor to implement innovative self-learning techniques in which the student can obtain a measure of their knowledge continuously along the whole course length. The proposed automatic evaluation system has been applied to several control engineering courses at the University of Seville and the results of a case study are presented here.