As above, this activity provides students with a first-look foundation in MatLab, with the expectation that they will use a variety of other resources to learn MatLab should they decide to use it for their research work.

This lab was designed for a course "Research in Computational Science", one of 11 courses in the computational sciences at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (Durham, NC). Students in this program are taught a number of computing tools, such as Mathematica, R/RStudio, spreadsheets, STELLA (system dynamics), NetLogo (agent-based modeling), Paraview (visualization), and others. This lab -- done out of class -- represents a very brief introduction to MatLab, which many of the students use for their independent research work in computational science. All of the tool-based activities presented in this class are designed to help the students make informed decisions about computing tools for their research work, and are not designed for a student to get substantial experience with that tool or tools. There are typically 9-10 students in this research group, competitively selected by application. NCSSM was the first state-supported residential program for gifted high school juniors and seniors. The program has 800 students across two campuses, and a large online program (~450 students). This activity would be very easy for others to use without adaptation by other teachers. The activity assumes a 50-minute introduction to MatLab during the instructional program.

We are primarily a Mathematica shop in the Science Department, while the Engineering Department primarily uses MatLab. This is an easy lab to do in Mathematica.
MatLab Challenges (Acrobat (PDF) 104kB Sep9 22)

No particular notes or tips. As the materials suggest, I am assuming that students leverage resources such as YouTube, MatLab documentation, etc. for help in completing this work.

Students send their completed MatLab file to me via email, or they can upload it to Canvas, our course management system.