Systems and control 8 to 13 with C-programming and industrial microcontrollers

There are a number of excellent commercial kits useful for teaching systems and control (SC) available for education. In setting up SC at Malvern College, we opted to engage our electronics expertise in the design and development of our own in-house microcontroller system. This research project aimed to develop a system while simultaneously teaching with it, to explore how pupil feedback could be directly incorporated in the design. This is truly a systems approach! This paper describes the evolution of the hard and software, over the 6-month design and development period. In particular the emergence of pupil capability is described and examples of direct influence of this on the system design. Our work involved pupils from years 8 to 13 with particular emphasis on years 8,9 and 10,11. In section 2 of this paper we introduce aims of the research and details of the system. Sections 3 and 4 describe how the system was used in teaching. The dynamics of the evolution of the system are discussed in section 6.