At the conclusion of this activity, the student will:

• Understand the exact differential equations.
• Understand how to solve the exact differential equations
• Understand the graphical representation of solutions of exact differential equations

The student will gain the following MATLAB skills:

• How to check if a differential equation is exact or not
• Able to display the result whether the given differential equation is exact or not
• Plot using fimplicit
• Add legends to their diagram

In this lesson, students use MATLAB to find the solution of Exact differential equations and interact with solutions with different initial conditions. This activity is developed as a new initiative to introduce MATLAB for Engineering mathematics students who wish to use MATLAB to solve differential equations.

Prior to working on this activity, students complete an introduction to MATLAB and learn the following: layout of MATLAB, accessing MATLAB documentation, using MATLAB drive, setting directories and paths, performing arithmetic in the command line, creating arrays and variables, using a Livescript, and basic plotting in their MATLAB module. Students also introduced different types of differential equations and the meaning of solution of differential equations. They are also able to solve an exact differential equation analytically.
They then immediately start working on this activity.