An experience of project based learning in aerospace engineering

Based on the authors teaching experiences this paper proposes the developing of a ProJect-Based Learning (PJBL) environment for Automatic Control Education in Aerospace Engineering (ACEAE), which have been developed in several projects that involved the same authors. The PJBL approach have been based on the following major aspects: a Hardware/Software platform (quadricopter and related ground station, etc) as an environment to design and implement automatic control laws, and a proper choice of such tools in order to facilitate the communication of the knowledge between student of different classes and academic years, thus also improving communication skills and teamwork experience. A new didactic formulation is thus proposed, summarized by a Professional Readiness Level (PRL) table, useful to organize the learning of automatic controls for the Aerospace Engineering faculties. The actual status of this concept is applied at the University of Bologna in the courses of Automatic flight Control and Applied Control. In this work the choice of educational tools which could make the academic laboratory activities sustainable over time is proposed and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is assessed by means of the direct experience of the authors which summarize the feedback of the students involved in courses.