The Control Zendo: A Game of Inductive Logic for Teaching Automatic Control

Abstract

Board games and card games have been used with some degree of success in the implementation of active strategies for education, since they stimulate problem solving and increase the learning and engagement of the students. This paper shows how the mechanics of the popular game Zendo have been adapted to teach elements of a basic automatic control course at the University of Stavanger. The result is the Control Zendo, a game of inductive logic in which a hidden rule related to different system's properties (e.g., linearity, time-varyingness or number of input and output variables) must be guessed. Implementational issues and the feedback received by the students who played the game in Spring 2022 are discussed.