ODYSC: A responsive educational web app for dynamics and control

The Online Dynamical Systems and Control (ODYSC) web application has been developed for the introductory dynamics and control courses taught to engineers and business engineering of Ghent university, accessible through http : //www. odysc. ugent. be/. Generally speaking, the advantage of web apps over conventional software is the compatibility between operating system (OS) and devices, as only a browser is required. Recently, students bring a mobile phone to lectures. While these are often used by the students themselves as a distraction, they are actually very powerful computers capable of performing simulations of dynamical systems. Because of this, ODYSC has been designed to be responsive, working equally well on both mobile phone as on a laptop or PC. While ODYSC can serve as a distance learning tool, it can also be employed during classical lectures. While the teacher explains new concepts in dynamics or control, these can immediately be made clear through simulations on the student's phone. Before, the amount of students attending these courses were a practical limitation for organizing computer labs. Even if such infrastructure exists, the software used requires the students to code in a new language, which they are often not motivated enough to do for a single lab, or the software is associated with costly or complicated licensing. ODYSC requires no special infrastructure but a device with a browser which students themselves bring anyway. ODYSC is still in full development and for now can perform open loop and closed loop simulations on LTI systems, and plot bode plots of the system. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.