in the Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology, presents a cross-curricular approach to learning about control technology. The recommended methodology is active learning, where the teacher's role is to stimulate the learner to build knowledge by providing him/her with appropriate materials (hardware and software) and suggestions to develop the target skills. The results are encouraging, although more tools are needed to help the learner to generalize from his/her concrete experiment in control technology as well as to evaluate its effect on the target skills. The contributions not only discuss epistemological controversies linked to such learning environments as control technology, but also report on the state of the art and new developments in the field and present some stimulating ideas.