Effectiveness of Animation as a Learning Strategy in a Classical Control Theory Introductory Course

Classical Control Theory (CCT) is one of the general education courses for many university engineering curricula. Course contents usually have deep theoretical definitions, high level of abstraction, computationally intensive procedures and demand students with a solid mathematical background. In the present paper, we explore how animation has the potential to contribute to the learning and comprehension of several contents included in a CCT introductory course. Based on current theories of multimedia learning, we incorporated animation components in modules designed for teaching various educational contents. Animation is an efficient didactic tool for explaining theoretical definitions, underlying methodologies involved in diagrams construction and computational procedures described on a CCT introductory course. We recommend that animation should be included in every CCT educational software