The project developed a public website (control-advent.com) that releases 24 multiple choice puzzles during 12/2024 and 12/2025, each embedding a fundamental control concept in a short Christmas themed story. In 2024, the calendar was offered in five languages and attracted about 1,050 participants worldwide, including high school and university students as well as practitioners. Quantitative analysis of responses and surveys shows increased perceived relevance of control and high enjoyment. The activity now serves as an annual outreach format and a testbed for peer reviewed control education exercises.
Project Lead: Prof. Steffi Knorn, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; [email protected]
IFAC Sponsor: TC 9.4, Control Education
Goals and concept
The project responds to low public awareness of control engineering and declining student interest in control‑related studies. The goal was to design a low‑threshold, playful format that exposes a broad audience to core ideas such as feedback, stability, and sampling without requiring prior control background. The Advent‑calendar format was chosen because it is familiar, time‑bounded, and well suited for short, repeated engagements across December. Each day’s puzzle presents a control‑related situation in a humorous Christmas story, followed by an explanation that links the scenario to a concrete concept or application.
Platform implementation
A dedicated website (control-advent.com) was developed to overcome the limitations of university‑specific learning management systems, which restricted the 2023 pilot to local students. The platform supports public registration, daily automatic release of questions from December 1–24, a point system with time‑based tie‑breaking, personal score views, and multilingual content. In 2024 the site ran in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Minor issues with mobile registration were observed at launch but were resolved during the first days of operation. The platform is now reusable for future Advent calendars and similar educational campaigns.
Question development and quality assurance
For the 2024 edition, 27 questions were contributed by an international group of control educators. Each question included a narrative, multiple‑choice options, and an explanation. A double‑blind review process was implemented: every submission was evaluated by two reviewers against criteria such as accessibility for non‑experts, conceptual correctness, entertainment value, and real‑life relevance. Four questions were rejected or removed; 23 were accepted after minor or major revisions, and one additional “bonus” question (all answers correct) completed the set of 24.
The questions were also classified using the using–explaining taxonomy developed for engineering exercises. This analysis confirmed that most calendar items emphasized conceptual understanding (“explaining”) more than routine calculation (“using”), in line with the outreach goal of highlighting ideas over algebra.
All questions were translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The translation work, supported by AI tools but carefully checked by native‑speaking colleagues, turned out to be a powerful additional quality‑assurance step, revealing ambiguities, hidden assumptions, or unintended control jargon in the original wording. These issues were corrected consistently across all language versions.
Participation and reach
The IFAC‑funded redesign enabled a substantial increase in scale compared to the 2023 prototype. In 2024 the calendar attracted approximately 1,050 registered participants, a factor of about 3.6 increase over the roughly 229 participants from 2023. Participants came from multiple countries, with particularly strong engagement in Norway, Italy, Spain, and Germany. While most participants were B.Sc. and M.Sc. students in STEM programmes, about 6% were high‑school students and many self‑identified as having little or no formal control background.
Educational impact
Survey responses from the 2023 and 2024 editions, complemented by analysis of answer statistics, provide evidence of educational impact. Participants reported that they enjoyed solving the daily puzzles, rated the difficulty as “about right,” and indicated that the activity increased their perception of how relevant control is to real‑life systems. Many respondents stated that the calendar made them more willing to engage with future control‑related courses or material. Quantitative analysis showed that questions rated as more conceptually demanding by experts indeed had a lower fraction of correct answers, validating the taxonomy‑based difficulty assessment.
Dissemination and community building
Results from the project have been disseminated through four peer‑reviewed conference papers, covering (i) the concept and first implementation of the control Advent calendar, (ii) quantitative analysis of questions using the using–explaining taxonomy, (iii) analysis of participant feedback, and (iv) reflections on the 2024 open, multi‑language edition and its use as a testbed for a future “Control Engineering Exercises” journal. The project has built a small but active international community of contributors from several universities, who co‑develop questions, translations, and dissemination activities.
Use of IFAC support and deviations from original plan
The IFAC Activity Fund primarily financed a part‑time staff position for a former student to coordinate platform development, content upload, translations, testing, and participant support. A small portion covered web‑hosting. The main milestones of the original proposal—a public website, a high‑quality set of questions for the 2024 calendar, and quantitative evaluation—were all achieved. The main deviation from the initial timeline was that translation and some question revisions continued closer to the December launch than originally planned.
Sustainability and next steps
The platform and workflow established with IFAC support will be reused for future editions and possibly adapted for other themes or seasons. The peer‑review and taxonomy‑based analysis processes tested here will inform the development of a curated repository or journal of control‑engineering exercises. We expect the Advent calendar to remain an annual outreach fixture that can be promoted through IFAC technical committees, national member organisations, and social media channels.
