An overview of information technologies that we use in control engineering education. This includes automatic generation of quizzes and assignments. The problem that we try to solve is as follows. We have a large quantities of students that need to be graded. We would like to have different assignments for each of them - the same assignment with diferent numbers.
As a UNIX fan, I prefer tools and methods that can be run in batches without user intervention so that most of the repetitive work can be avoided. This involves MATLAB for generation of random numbers and for calculations in control engineering and LaTeX for creation of beautiful documents containing mathematics. Our first solutions to problems that we face were based on these two tools - MATLAB created LaTeX documents. Paper related to this approach is here and sample files for the whole procedure here [ZIP].
However, it has been found out later, that we need to provide a single problem in various output formats and the soulution based on MATLAB/LaTeX was not general enough. Therefore, an intermediate came into play - XML. Now, we use MATLAB to generate random numbers and XML as an output neutral problem representation. XML files are then transformed into a suitable output representation using XSLT. Technical report with this approach is here with sample files attached.