Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB^®

Workshop: Carleton College- Northfield, MN

This post was edited by Mitchell Bender-Awalt on Feb, 2018
Hello everybody!

MathWorks and SERC are running a webinar on Thursday, April 28 that highlights resources and tips for teaching data processing and analysis, simulation, and modeling using MATLAB®. The focus will be on the curriculum materials created as part of the October 2015 Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB workshop (which many of you attended) sponsored by NAGT and MathWorks®.

Webinar title: Developing Quantitative Skills Using Geoscience Data and MATLAB®
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/data_models/matlab16/index.html
Date and time: Thursday, April 28 at 1:00 pm PT | 2:00 pm MT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET
(Virtual live session, 1 hour)

Presenters:
Lisa Kempler, MATLAB Community Strategist, MathWorks
Andrew Fischer, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Charly Bank, Earth Sciences, University of Toronto
Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, Geology, Western Washington University

This 60-minute webinar will showcase the webpages and resources designed collaboratively by SERC and MathWorks for teaching undergraduates in Earth Science and related courses. These resources enable you to explore and find teaching tools that effectively combine key geoscience concepts with computation using MATLAB. The presenters will discuss common challenges of teaching quantitative skills, focusing on data visualization and analysis, and showcase three examples of geoscience teaching activities utilizing MATLAB as a tool:

1) Visualizing outcrop patterns from strike/dip data using MATLAB
2) Working with scientific data sets in MATLAB: An exploration of ocean color and sea surface temperature
3) Signal processing and earthquake triggering

During the webinar, participants are encouraged to ask questions live of the presenters via the chat session.

The webinar is free, but registration is required.
Registration deadline: Tuesday, April 26

Please feel free to forward this invitation to interested parties and departments.

Regards,
Alice Newman, Science Education Resource Center
Lisa Kempler, MathWorks

Good morning everyone,
it's been a week since the SERC webinar. It was my first webinar ever, and I did like the experience. Andy, Jackie, Lisa, and I each contributed a few powerpoint slides and also ran code during the session, while Alice and Monica did all the background work (joining our slides into one presentation, setting up the conference, switching to our screens and back). All I had to do was log on, then my phone rang, and we were connected. We had 65 participants; they did ask questions in the chat during the webinar and we also had a few emails afterwards. For those of you who have not participated and are curious, check out the landing page http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/data_models/matlab16/index.html and those who have participated and have questions don't hesitate to contribute to this post. Someone will answer!
I am curious about the fall webinar on teaching science with data, and am starting to think about a poster/talk for the proposed AGU session; after all I am planning to revamp my "computational geology" course over the summer and fall and that abstract deadline will push me to get something done.
Regards from Charly

I just wanted to follow up with Charly's post. The whole process ran incredibly smoothly considering that the presenters were connecting across three countries and two continents. Alice and Lisa did a great job in coordinating the whole event. Participating in the webinar prompted me to revisit my activity and clean it up somewhat. And, getting feedback/comments from the webinar participants gave me a sense of how my activity would be received in a classroom outside my own, leading me to rewrite some of the instructions for clarity. Overall, since I was so familiar with implementing my activity in the classroom, there was minimal work involved with preparation for the webinar. The benefits, in terms of feedback from just a few questions, far exceeded the time cost involved with the preparation. Aside from that, I am now particularly motivated to develop extension activities and develop new ones all together. Hope to see many of you at AGU where you can hopefully present in a teaching with MATLAB session. Andy