Introducing Feedback Control to Middle and High School STEM Students, Part 1: Basic Concepts

This paper presents some insights on introducing control concepts to middle and high school STEM students. It summarizes the author’s experience in introducing control to such students at multiple workshops preceding control conferences. The author has found that if one understands and works with the most common skill sets for such students, principles of feedback and feedforward control can be introduced to such students with considerable success. The students are always engaged through the talk, with nobody looking at their phones. In Part 1 (this paper), we share here the ideas behind the success of these talks. In Part 2 (Abramovitch (2019)), we show how to discuss control systems math to students who have not had calculus or differential equations.