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for Engineers, and wrote supplementary material to fill in the missing pieces.
A few years later, working with graduate student and teaching assistant John Crocetti, he expanded the supplementary material into a
textbook. He initially distributed Introduction to Programming with MATLAB online, chapter by chapter. In subsequent years, the book
was provided as a PDF document at the beginning of each semester.
In 2012, we seized an opportunity to write a new, updated textbook as an ebook, making it available to students with iPad devices. In
addition to being more portable than a traditional textbook, an Apple ebook offers several other advantages. First, it can easily be
updated to include new material and reflect the latest version of MATLAB. Second, animations and videos can be included, helping
students understand abstract and complex subjects best illustrated with motion. The CS 103 ebook has numerous videos, including one
showing an animated surface plot and another showing the insertion of a new node in a linked list (Figure 2).
We were careful to provide consistent, accepted definitions for all computer science terms used in the course. When students encounter a
new term in the ebook, with a single tap they can see a definition, jump to the glossary, or even switch to a browser and read more about
the term on Wikipedia. They can take notes, highlight text, and copy code snippets to try in MATLAB (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Student annotations showing code selected for copying (blue) and text highlighted for later review (green).
Many students use MATLAB Mobile on their iPad to try out new programming concepts as they learn them. MATLAB Mobile enables
them to execute scripts and commands via a MATLAB session running on the cloud (Figure 4). Students can use this capability from
their dorm room or anywhere else on campus, freeing them from having to visit a computer lab or carry their laptops around to
experiment with new ideas.
CS 103 concludes with a project in which the students apply the concepts they have learned throughout the semester. Past projects have
included processing and analyzing Twitter data in MATLAB and calculating the force needed to slingshot a rocket around Jupiter and
out of the solar system, for example.
CS 103 Today
CS 103 is now a required course for first-year civil, chemical, mechanical, and biomedical engineering students at Vanderbilt. The course
is also popular among science majors and other non-engineering students, and about a quarter of the more than 200 students enrolled
each semester take the course as an elective.
In addition to its growing popularity among students, the course has garnered the approval of engineering faculty across departments.
Because students now learn MATLAB in their first year, professors in upper-level courses no longer have to spend valuable class time
teaching MATLAB basics. In fact, weve tailored the course to meet the needs of other professors at Vanderbilt; for example, the lesson
on file input and output, with an associated section in the ebook, was added based on faculty suggestions.
As for the ebook, it has been well received by the students. One student commented, "I really enjoyed the textbook. The examples started
out simple and easy to understand and progressed to more challenging throughout each chapter. The commentary throughout was fun,
and the functions at the back of the chapter really helped me practice the concepts. It was nice that half the solutions were easily
accessible online. The graphics and images were also really great and easy to understand. Lastly, I appreciated the computer version of
the textbook, which made it easy to carry around. Made my class much more enjoyable."
In CS 101, engineering students felt like misfits in a course geared toward computer scientists. In CS 103, that is no longer the case. They
clearly enjoy the course and, as a result, work harder and learn more.
Products Used
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MATLAB
Published 2013
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