The paper focuses on the education in the field of process control and automation. Controller design based on the principles of predictive control- MPC (Model Predictive Control) is shown. The proposed discrete-time controller with state observer are used to control a 4th order electric system and the influence of selected parameters on the behavior of the closed loop is shown. For comparison, control by a discrete-time LQ controller with asymptotic set-point tracking is presented. The control is implemented using the laboratory system RCDue, which allows the implementation of the proposed controllers in MATLAB environment. The paper is related to previous papers devoted to the description of the laboratory system RCDue and its use for the identification of the controlled system model and the implementation of the discrete-time state observer and the LQ controller.