Essay Instructions

This workshop is designed to explore how teaching with MATLAB can enhance the student learning environment in undergraduate Earth Science and related courses. We ask each participant in this workshop to write a short essay about their experience/expertise related to using MATLAB with undergraduate students to teach quantitative skills. Others are welcome to submit essays also. The purpose of this essay is to provide an introduction to the other workshop participants to your work and thinking on using MATLAB as a tool in your teaching. The essays will be posted on the workshop website and become part of the On the Cutting Edge resource collections. We hope that your essay will be a strong piece of writing sharing a few important ideas, points, or results that you think will be of high interest to the other participants, rather than a comprehensive list of all of your work. Your essay might address:

  • one or two challenges in teaching about or learning quantitative skills in the geosciences and allied fields, and the strategies you use to meet those challenges
  • the role that MATLAB tools play in your teaching and why you use these tools specifically
  • strategies you use to assess students' quantitative skills, use of data and/or understanding of computer modeling in the Earth sciences.
  • research you have been engaged with that bears on using MATLAB in the classroom, the teaching, learning of quantitative skills, modeling, or data visualization.

Essays should be no longer than two pages. If there are references (either your own or the work of others) that are important to your thinking, please list them at the end of the essay. Please save your essay as a Microsoft Word or PDF file to upload with your workshop registration.

Examples

Here are a couple of example essays from previous workshops to give you some ideas about how you might approach writing yours.













Please upload your essay (in PDF or Word format) using the file upload below. We need you to upload it as a file because most formatting will be lost from the text you pasted above. Having you both paste the text and upload the file saves us hours of work. (Thank you!)

You may also choose to upload up to two additional files or images to supplement your essay. This is completely optional. If you choose to upload additional files, you must hold the copyright to the file contents or have written permission to use them from the copyright holder.