Tag Archives: computing

February 17, 2010, 9:59 pm

And so it begins: Lab #1 in the MATLAB course

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…

January 31, 2010, 1:52 pm

MATLAB course details and update

By Robert Talbert

We start classes this week, a bit later than most other folks thanks to our January term. That means the long-awaited MATLAB course will be formally kicking off. I’ve had a few people ask me about what we’re doing in this course, so here’s an update.

This has been a tricky course to plan, because the audience is definitely not the usual one for an introductory MATLAB course. Almost all the introductory textbooks and materials I reviewed for the course, and all the introductory MATLAB courses I looked at from other schools, have a particular student demographic in mind: they are all engineering majors; they are all freshmen or sophomores with either a semester of programming under their belts or at least a very high level of comfort with computers and the “guts” of programming; and they are all attending large universities in which the particular academic makeup of the institution plays …