A Serious Game Approach for Teaching Control Concepts from Simulation-to-Real Robotic Framework

Control engineering is traditionally introduced through formal mathematical modelling, which may limit preuniversity students' ability to link learned notions with system behaviour. Recent discussions in the control education community advocate approaches emphasising feedback and basic control principles over excessive formalism. In this context, Serious Games (SGs) offer a promising way to combine structured control concepts with interactive experimentation. This paper presents the design and preliminary validation of a SG for introducing PID control to high-school students. The SG is embedded in a two-step educational framework combining virtual experimentation with a Segway-based robot, and subsequent hands-on activities on the same physical platform. Educational effectiveness was evaluated along two complementary dimensions, perception and knowledge. Perception captures students' self-reported confidence and attitudes toward robotics and control, while knowledge measures their objective understanding of PID concepts. A pilot study involving 33 students (31 with complete matched data) was conducted using a pre-post design. Perception scores increased significantly from 3.18 to 3.66(Δ=+0.48, p< 0.001), while knowledge scores increased from 3.61 to 4.29 out of 5(Δ=+0.68, p=0.0014), corresponding to a gain of +13.5 percentage points. These results indicate that SGs can effectively support the initial understanding of PID control while facilitating the transition toward physical implementation.