Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB^®

Workshop: Carleton College- Northfield, MN

Hello,

I am having a friendly tussle with a colleague over the virtues of MATLAB vs Phython for teaching computation and coding across many disciplines (science-engineering-humanities). This is for a proposal to develop a University-wide course on computational thinking/big data. Of course, I am on the MATLAB side of things. Does anyone know of any literature/documentation that promotes the virtues of MATLAB over Python for this purpose? Thanks for your help.

Andy

Hi Andy,

I just now did a quick Google search using "matlab vs python teaching," and a bunch of items came up - Mathworks and MATLAB Central have things to say on the topic. You'll also find a variety of articles and websites addressing the debate. I also found that the Computer Science Department at Tufts teaches an undergraduate course - Intro to Computational Design, which uses a MATLAB platform (there might be someone there to contact). If you are writing a proposal it might help to be aware of the common exchanges of the debate and figure out a position statement with a purpose if you are trying to argue for a side. Best Regards, -Risa