For some time I have been using Matlab to create presentations in my teaching, and more specifically the presentations I use for my teaching students have been doing Matlab Index assignments. The Matlab program is easy to use, and the output is always the same, which is a final exam grade. I must say I was a little disappointed when I first learned that my assignment didn’t pass because I felt it should.

I did not know this at the time and assumed that perhaps my students were having difficulty with the project. In actual fact, most of my students seemed to have no problems. However, one of my assistant professors noticed that I was not receiving the same answers from all of my students. He also said that the matlab assignments were creating a lot of “sticky” factors and this was affecting the overall score. He did not give any specific details, but I presume that his problem lay in the fact that we had a greater number of students taking the project than anticipated and the difficulty level increased over time.

After discussing this with my assistant professor, we decided that perhaps my students were having difficulties understanding the meaning behind matlab expressions such as the answer. To show my assistant professor the correct way of preparing the matlab file, I created a video to demonstrate matlab usage. Once my assistant professor saw the video he Related Site immediately approved my assignment for use with matlab software. We all hope that this will solve our problems as it has for the two of us.

Unfortunately there are still a few people that feel they cannot or should not use matlab because of the difficulty level associated with the project. This is completely a matter of opinion and everyone must take their own view on matlab usage. It is true that some students find matlab very difficult to use, but the assignments can still be very satisfactorily written if the student has some knowledge of the subject. If you cannot write an assignment involving matrices using matlab because you have no idea what they do you may wish to consider writing the assignment for another student on another subject that does have matlab applications.

Another difficulty that a few of my students have had with matlab is that there are many options and functions within matlab itself. Many of the functions and menus of matlab are quite confusing to me when attempting to use them. When I began using matlab I found that many of the functions appeared to be designed for some other program, but once I became aware of the functions actually made sense. In addition to this, matlab comes standard with several different visualizations, charts, graphs, and visual basic applications which can make the assignment much easier to understand.

Visualization is probably one of the most useful functions of matlab. Using matlab visualizations you can easily visualize your project in three dimensions, four dimensions or any other number of dimensions that are possible. Visualizations can also help you see your project in stages of completion. The phases of a project are very useful in project planning and analysis. You can see at a glance the stages that you need to accomplish and organize yourself accordingly.

There are many additional functions that matlab has that will help you tremendously when completing your assignments. These functions and capabilities make it far easier to organize your data and tasks. I for one really like being able to see my entire project in Excel spreadsheets at the click of a button. Being able to create excel spreadsheets from matlab projects is extremely convenient. Many assignments require me to manually open up excel and enter data into it, this can be a huge time saver when trying to complete an assignment.

My last point in favor of matlab is that it is an extremely flexible program. Students are not stuck working with the same assignments every week. They can swap assignments around to suit their schedule if they desire. A final plus to matlab is that it is completely free. There are no long term contracts or purchasing expensive costs involved.