Design and Preliminary Evaluation of a Portable Kit for Programmable Logic Controller Education

PLC control programming is a complex cognitive skill that requires hands‐on experience to develop proficiency. Successful automation/control engineers must know how to write PLC programs to control and troubleshoot the process being automated. Often, because of limitations in equipment availability, students must share equipment. Also, in academic settings, sometimes lecture and lab times are separated by a period of days, leading to decay of knowledge. To increase access to PLC technology, an educational tool kit called Portable PLC is being developed. The vision for Portable PLC is to create an open platform that instructors and students can use to design, build, experiment, and learn about programmable logic controllers during lectures and labs or at home, anytime and anywhere. Thirty-five portable PLC kits were designed and built. The kits were evaluated by 39 undergraduate students. Pre and post tests were used to assess their understanding of timer instructions, specifically the Timer On (TON) instruction. Students made statistically significant learning gains as a result of using Portable PLC, and rated the kit positively in terms of its effect on helping them to learn PLC programming, ease of use, allowing them visualize the process, motivating them to want to learn, and relevance. Most importantly, they responded that they wanted to see more tools like the portable PLC kit.