Practice-intensive learning: An effective approach to enhance the fundamental skills of PLC Beginners

Programmable logic controller (PLC) is an essential course for the students whose major are automaton related, since this course is highly connected to industry, and many other technical courses have a direct/indirect relationship with PLC. This paper is focused on thoroughly investigating the detailed contents and approaches to achieve the proposed paradigm called Practice-Intensive Learning. It provides a vision about how to re-design the PLC course to strengthen the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of beginners via hands-on and minds-on learning in all modules including interactive lectures, individual laboratories and innovative projects. The way about how to make the three modules fully integrated is also introduced. The evaluation results from the students and the peers have proven the effectiveness of the proposed method. Through the systematic integration of knowledge absorption, simulations, experiments and real-world implementation, beginners confidently and curiously stepped into the world of automaton by using PLC as an effective tool. The proposed methodology is also applicable for other technical courses in undergraduate and graduate levels.