Ball and Beam system is one of the most popular and important laboratory models for teaching control systems. This paper proposes a new control strategy to the position control for the ball and beam system. Firstly, a nonlinear controller is proposed based on the backstepping approach. Secondly, in order to adapt online the dynamic control law, adaptive laws are developed to estimate the uncertain parameters. The stability of the proposed adaptive backstepping controller is proved based on the Lyapunov theorem. Simulated results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.