Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB^®

Workshop: Carleton College- Northfield, MN

Hi, everyone -

Great seeing and meeting everyone last week.

Question/request for all of you:
When we met, we talked about the value of having a set of videos to introduce new students to MATLAB. We discussed whether mathworks.com may already have what's needed, or not. Or maybe it has some and needs to be augmented with "your favorite video topic goes here".

I was hoping to get a couple of volunteers who are willing to peruse the MathWorks web site, Youtube, and any other sources (Google, etc.) and compile their best shot at a starter video kit. Nominees include:
- Jackie (is it better than the tutorial, or not?)
- Frederik/Chris (you mentioned then you could avoid making them)
- Andy (you were actually asking about code examples, but do videos work? Do you prefer code examples)
- Zan (Is this something on your agenda?)
- Jeni (Interested?)

Don't be hurt if I've left you out; I recall this crowd being interested. If you're not listed and you're interested, write back soon.

I would love to have the "recommended starter kit video set for geoscience students" posted on the SERC page.

If you need pointers to resources, let me know.

Volunteers?

Thanks,
Lisa

Hi Lisa,

Happy to contribute. I will likely post something late next week, or would you prefer an email for you to collate all the responses?

Andy

Andy -

Thanks for volunteering!

It would be ideal if you would share it with the group via this forum, so they could comment. Perhaps they'll have a different set, or maybe they want to work with you to create one or more optimal video sets/progressions, that's even better.

Once we get some consensus or even a collection of options, they can be posted to the SERC site.

Lisa

I don't have a huge amount of time right now but I'll help out when I can too.

aloha,
Jackie

Hello Everyone,

I have been going through the Mathworks web site looking for introductory videos for students new to Matlab. Here is a list that I will probably use for my students to give them their first exposure to MATLAB. Sarah Zaranek has a couple good introductory videos. My browser keeps defaulting the Australia website. You might need to delete the "au" in front of Mathworks in the URLs.

Working with Arrays in MATLAB
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/working-with-arrays-in-matlab-69022.html?s_tid...

Introducing MATLAB Fundamental Classes (Data Types)
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/introducing-matlab-fundamental-classes-data-ty...

Introducing Structures and Cell Arrays
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/introducing-structures-and-cell-arrays-68992.html

Importing Spreadsheets into MATLAB
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/importing-spreadsheets-into-matlab-68987.html

Writing a MATLAB Program
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/writing-a-matlab-program-69023.html?s_tid=srch...

Publishing Code from the Editor
http://au.mathworks.com/videos/publishing-matlab-code-from-the-editor-69016.h...


The MATLAB Fundamentals Academic Tutorial, through MATLAB Academy and Onrmap seems very applicable for introductory students to work through, as Jackie pointed out, on their own time. Students work through examples of historical gas prices, marriage statistics and an acoustic file of a blue whale call (good for my marine science/fisheries students). Students work with these data sets and analyse, plot and visualize the data. Not necessarily Geoscience related, but a good general introduction. Completion of the Onramp leads to other tutorials, which cost money.

Also, Cody seems to be a good environment to challenge your students with a quick quiz. I will attempt to use this somehow next term and will report back here. Through Cody students will be able to quickly assess their capability and progress against others in the class. The only drawback is that it does not appear to be limited to your class, or maybe there is way to personalize/restrict groups within Cody (Lisa? Loren?)? This might be a good place to start a Geoscience section of small exercises/quizzes for the global Geoscience community?

There were also several webinars, mostly engineering related. I did not come across one Geoscience related webinar in English. There appeared to be a good one in German. Can't say that I have thorough examined all of the resources on the website, though, and will continue to post things here as I find them.

I hope this is at least a start.

Andy

You can make class assignments using Cody Coarsework (http://www.mathworks.com/academia/cody-coursework/), very Cody-like - but you decide who gets to see the questions. You can also build a test suite with it to automatically score answers. There's an instructor walk-through via a link on that page.

I did a webinar for IRIS earlier this year, in English :-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ZAVJRFLP8 -- MATLAB for Analyzing and Visualizing Geospatial Data - I showed you one of the demos at the SERC meeting. It's not all-inclusive, but might be a help. It's about 50 minutes followed by some questions.

Thanks very much, Andy.

I like your video list. I'm curious what everyone else thinks of it for their teaching purposes.
Anyone?

About webinars for learning MATLAB:
Other than Loren's webinar above, consider topics by product, which is often how they're listed. For example,
- If you're doing a lot of mapping, see the list of webinars under that product: http://www.mathworks.com/products/mapping/webinars.html
- If you're doing data analysis, see the list, say, under Curve Fitting Toolbox: http://www.mathworks.com/products/curvefitting/webinars.html
FYI, there's one for scientists: MATLAB Tools for Scientists - Introduction to Statistical Analysis on that same page
- Also, Youtube is a good source.

If you identify great ones for your fields, let us know, so we can capture and categorize them in relevant places for geoscience, oceanography, etc. in the future.

Lisa

Thanks very much, Andy.

I like your video list. I'm curious what everyone else thinks of it for their teaching purposes.
Anyone?

About webinars for learning MATLAB:
Other than Loren's webinar above, consider topics by product, which is often how they're listed. For example,
- If you're doing a lot of mapping, see the list of webinars under that product: http://www.mathworks.com/products/mapping/webinars.html
- If you're doing data analysis, see the list, say, under Curve Fitting Toolbox: http://www.mathworks.com/products/curvefitting/webinars.html
FYI, there's one for scientists: MATLAB Tools for Scientists - Introduction to Statistical Analysis on that same page
- Also, Youtube is a good source.

If you identify great ones for your fields, let us know, so we can capture and categorize them in relevant places for geoscience, oceanography, etc. in the future.

Lisa

Hi,
just a brief note. I have a research student who is analyzing some magnetic data. He had never worked with MATLAB and last week I sent him to the onramp. I did ask him to send me some thoughts, here is part of his email:
"I found that the training was very good and very helpful. It provided a good overview of the software and some of its basic functionalities, and I was also able to practice coding using a web-based version of the MATLAB program during the training and receive feedback about my performance. I would recommend this to other students who are new to the program"
We met yesterday and he has been able to use a script I had given him to read the data and code an additional script to analyze that data. From that it seems that the onramp did work for him.
Charly