The workshop is organized by the National Science Foundation for High School teachers of Math and Science and it is a sequel to the NSF/CSS Workshop on New Directions in Control Engineering Education that was held at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 2-3, 1998.

The purpose of the workshop is to enhance the cooperation among various control groups and high school teachers of Math and Science throughout the United States and the world, to give attention to control and systems ideas and technology, and to increase the general awareness of the importance of control and systems technology and its cross-disciplinary nature among high school teachers and students.

Control and Systems Science occurs in many different disciplines and it's applications occur in a wide variety of technologies. It involves a variety of tasks, such as, modeling, identification, simulation, planning, decision making, and optimization.

Some application areas of control and systems include transportation, manufacturing, communications, processing industries, and financial markets. The basic control systems science influences and impacts a diverse range of study, such as, biology, physics, chemistry, economics, and medicine.

The need of modern industry for well trained systems scientists is growing and changing, due to the marketplace pressures and the advances in technology. Future generations of our students will have to be broadly educated to cope with cross-disciplinary applications and rapidly changing technology. The backgrounds of our students are also changing. They are better prepared to work with modern computing technologies. Thus the time is ripe for major renovations in math and science high school education. It is important to develop a cross-disciplinary set of examples, demonstrations and laboratory exercises that illustrate systems and control across the entire spectrum of math and science. We will share with high school teachers our successful control stories, existing tools and experiments. There is much to be gained by sharing of educational experiences and practices.

The outcomes of the first workshop are expected to be of global interest and applicability. It is expected to make high school teachers of math and science more aware of the fundamental importance of the control systems technology in the day-to-day lives of people everywhere.

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