Santa has everything under control : a control themed advent calendar

Abstract

We describe the process of creating a control themed advent calendar quiz by means of a joint effort of researchers involved in control education from different countries, of distributing it among our students, and of collecting and analysing feedback from who answered the quiz. The created calendar consists of 24 problems, one for each of the 24 days before Christmas, and has been proposed to university students with the aim of showing them the many aspects that control engineering touches upon, and how this discipline can be useful in a wide variety of applications. We thus discuss the lessons learned from carrying on this initiative, with the purpose of aiding the creation and management of similar ones by listing what we believe are good practices in collaboratively creating quizzes, and in general what we believe may improve control education and serve as a valuable measure for outreach.