It is widely known that virtual laboratories can improve and complete university lectures. This paper presents laboratories, that allow engineering students to design a pole placement based controller for typical control problems: inverted pendulum, Furuta pendulum, crane, ball and beam. The dynamics of the plants and instructions for controller design and test are provided on smartboards of the virtual laboratory. The controller can be designed by the help of Octave Online. Finally, the controller performance can be studied by the model of the real-life application. The mathematical models and controller design are presented as well as the experiences in the virtual laboratory of control engineering.