The MATLAB course began in earnest on Monday this week with our first full-length lab activity session. This was the second overall meeting, the first one being some organizational stuff and a lengthy fly-through of the main features of MATLAB. What follows is a breakdown of what we did and how it went, which also serves as an invitation for critique and suggestions in the comments.

First, some context. I intend for this course to be heavily hands-on with an emphasis on self-teaching within reasonable bounds. I laid a ground rule in the first class meeting that any question of the form “How do you do ____ in MATLAB?” was going to be met with the responses “What have you found in the MATLAB help documentation? What have you found via a Google search? What have you found out from your lab partner?” I’m not above giving hints to students in the class, but I insist that they exhaust all…

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