Announcements

Upcoming Deadlines
Homeworks

Homework 7 Solutions

Homework 8
Tue 16 Jun 2015 5:00 AM PET

The "official" solutions are now available.

Tue 9 Jun 2015 11:00 AM PET

Recent Discussions

Homework 8 (letter_counter)
Warning

HW8- sparse_array_in()
Last post by Lee H Lafferty COMMUNITY
TA (3 minutes ago)

q1

The grader checks the function letter_counter using your

own m files, that is, the solutions to all problems in
homework 7. When you use fopen in your solution, make
sure that you DO NOT USE THE FLAG 'w' instead of 'r'
by accident. If you do, the contents of the file will be
erased. Then if you run the grader, it will erase all your
homework 7 solutions! Remember 'r' is for reading, 'w' is
for writing! Also, it is a good idea to keep a backup of your
work on another media, or dropbox or something else.

Last post by Lee H Lafferty COMMUNITY

TA (16 minutes ago)

A class using MATLAB

opened May 21
Last post by Khaled Magdy Abdelsadek
(19 minutes ago)

HW8 Q4
Last post by Aatish Kumar (22 minutes
ago)

HW8 Q1
Last post by Parastoo Veisi (an hour ago)

Tue 2 Jun 2015 1:00 PM PET

Browse all discussions

Homework 6 Solutions
The "official" solutions are now available.
Tue 2 Jun 2015 12:50 PM PET

Homework 5 Solutions
The "official" solutions are now available.
Tue 26 May 2015 11:00 AM PET

Homework 8 Update
There was a bug in the grader. I have uploaded a new

hw8.p. You will need to use this one. IMPORTANT: even

if you have already uploaded your solution code, you will
need run the new grader and resubmit the new code.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Wed 20 May 2015 12:16 AM PET

Homework Update
There are several updates we would like to share with
you:
Homework 8, the final set of programming assignments
are available. The first three problems are related to
Lesson 8. The remaining seven are general MATLAB
problems designed to test your programming ability at the
conclusion of the course. The deadline is about four
weeks away, so you have plenty of time. Note that the
starred (***) problems are indeed challenging and not the
usual few-line long functions. But most of you will have
already achieved the 67% passing grade after finishing
Homework 7, so just enjoy the feeling of accomplishment
as you solve these final problems. Enjoy!
The "official" solutions for Homework 4 are now
available.
There were a few cases of the grader not generating the
correct code. We have updated all the remaining
graders with a fix. If you have already solved and
submitted your work, you do not need to do anything. If
you are still working on a set, you may want to redownload the grader. Note that you still need a MATLAB
release of 2011 or later in order for the grader to generate
the expected codes.
Tue 19 May 2015 9:23 AM PET

Example MATLAB programs

We have made available all the example programs that
are used in the video lectures from Lesson 5 on. Visit the
page of the given lesson and there is a link to a zip file
containing the m files right next to the lecture slides.
Thu 14 May 2015 10:26 AM PET

Homework 7 Clarification
(roman)
We have updated the specification for the roman function
(HW7 Q7). The grader did not change, but the problem
specs did not match exactly our intentions and what the
grader is checking. If you have already solved this
problem and passed the grader, you are fine.
Thu 14 May 2015 9:09 AM PET

Homework Sub-Forums
I have created separate sub-forums for each week's
programming assignments under the Assignments forum.
Please, start using these when asking questions, making
comments. Hopefully this will provide better organization
to the very lively discussions going on.
Wed 13 May 2015 8:59 AM PET

Homework 7
The programming assignments for Lesson 7 are now
available. Sorry for the delay. The final set of problems
will be released in about a week. Have fun!
Tue 12 May 2015 1:30 PM PET

Homework 3 Solutions
The "official" solutions are now available here. Note that
even simple problems typically have multiple solutions.
So, if you solved any or all problems in a different way,
that is fine. As long as the grader was happy with your
results, you get the credit.
Tue 12 May 2015 12:47 PM PET

Lesson 7

Lesson 7 videos are now available. However, we are still

finalizing the programming assignments and the grader,
so they will not be available until the first part of next
week. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Fri 8 May 2015 8:00 AM PET

Homework 6 Update
The grader for the Lesson 6 programming assignments
(hw6.p) have been updated. The only change is that the
test cases for approximate_pi have been relaxed after a
few people ran into rounding issues causing the grader to
fail otherwise correct solutions for the strictest tests.
There is no other change. If you have already submitted
your alphanumeric code including a good approximate_pi
solution, you do not need to do anything. If you are still
working on it, but have already downloaded the grader.
download it again and write over the old version. The way
to tell the difference is by checking the approximate_pi
problem. If it tests with 1e-15 and 1e-16, you are running
the old version.
Mon 4 May 2015 11:07 AM PET

Lesson 6
Lesson 6 is now available. Note the programming
assignments are getting progressively harder as we we
get through the material. Before you report an issue with
the grader, read the previous announcement and follow
the instructions how to report a problem. If you do not
provide the information we request, the likelihood of
getting an answer is lower. Posts supplying the necessary
information will have higher priority.
Fri 1 May 2015 8:40 AM PET

Issue reporting
We have started receiving comments on the discussion
forum about the grader being faulty. A couple of
observations:

1. We have tested the grader thoroughly. That does not

mean that there are no bugs left. But it means that the
probability that your function has a problem, as opposed
to the grader, is pretty high. I know it is hard, but your first
assumption should be that you have made a mistake.
2. It is not very helpful to say that "my add_it_all function
works perfectly, yet the grader reports that it fails on input
[1 2 3]". Here is what we ask you to do instead. Take the
**exact** input the grader says it failed with, run it directly
and copy/paste what MATLAB prints into your post.
Continuing the previous example, this is what we would
like to see:
The grader reports that my function fails, but this is
what I get when I run it directly:
>> add_it_all([1 2 3])
ans =
5
What is going on?
You can copy/paste the grader's output as well for even
more information. In this case, assuming that the problem
asks for adding all elements of an input array, we would
immediately see that you missed the first element from
the summation. But if you only say that it works perfectly,
we have no idea whether you are right and why the
grader would report it otherwise.
Please, follow these instructions. This will save us time
and it will enable us to answer more questions. Thanks,
The Staff

Wed 22 Apr 2015 7:55 AM PET

New Lessons and

Assignments
Hello,
Lessons 3 and 4 are now available. These include two
sets of programming assignments, one each for the two
lessons. You can access all material for a given lesson,
including video links, YouTube HD video links, slides and
the assignments on the Navigation Bar on the left by

clicking on a given lesson. The assignments are also

accessible via the Homework button on the Navigation
Bar on the left. While the Quiz button shows your current
scores.
A few words on the programming assignments.
Please, read the instructions on the homework page
carefully. You will need to download the problems set, a
PDF file. You will also need to download the grader
program, save it in an empty folder, start MATLAB and
set its current folder to the folder that contains the grader,
called hw3.p for Lesson 3, for example. Create your
solution functions in this very same folder. You will need
to run this program to test your solutions by typing its
name, for example, hw3. Make sure that the grader
program's name remains the original, e.g. hw3.p, and that
you name your function m files exactly as the assignment
specifies. You can test your functions one by one, or test
them all, as you will see from the menu the grader will
print. If you test them all, it will generate an alphanumeric
code. This is the code that you will need to enter
(copy/paste) on the given Coursera Homework page to
get credit for your work.It is actually a whole lot simpler
than it sounds, as you'll see.
DO NOT SHARE SOLUTIONS on the forum or
elsewhere! DO NOT SHARE THE CODES on the forum
or elsewhere. This would defeat the purpose of this whole
assignment business. The only way to learn programming
is by doing it. Copying somebody else's program will get
you nowhere. Not to mention the honor code statement
that you will need to sign when submitting your work.
We have released four weeks' worth of material already.
This is because some of you want to progress rapidly.
Notice that the deadlines for these assignments are
weeks away. So, if you take it slowly, no worries, there is
plenty of time to watch the videos, learn the material and
solve the programming assignments. From now on, we
plan to release one Lesson per week, typically on Fridays.
Have fun,
Akos, Mike and Robert
Fri 17 Apr 2015 5:00 PM PET

Welcome to Computer
Programming with MATLAB
Greetings, aspiring programmers;
Welcome to the world of computer programming with
MATLAB. The course is now open, and the first two
weeks of video lectures and the first quiz are available.
To begin, you'll need to install MATLAB on your
computer. To download the installer, visit the course at
https://class.coursera.org/matlab-001 and look for the
"MATLAB Download" link in the left navigation bar. Note
that the default MATLAB version that comes up on the
download page is R2015a. While that should behave
nearly identically to 2014b as far as the material
presented in this course are concerned, it was the latter
that we used to prepare the videos and assignments.
Therefore we recommend you download and install
version R2014b.
We also offer an electronic companion textbook,
Computer Programming with MATLAB, written specifically
for this course. The lecture videos and other course
materials are designed to be self-contained, so the book
is optional. However, the e-book may be useful in
reinforcing the skills you'll learn in the online course and
for quickly looking things up instead of searching through
hours of videos.It also includes additional advanced
concepts which are beyond the scope of the course. The
book can be purchased for $9.99 at http://cs103.net/.
Finally, please take a few minutes to complete the
pre-course survey at https://class.coursera.org/matlab001/quiz/start?quiz_id=29. Information from this survey
helps us gain a better understanding of just who our
students are, and gives us useful feedback for improving
our course as well as all of Vanderbilt's MOOCs.
We hope you enjoy learning about computer
programming with MATLAB, and we look forward to
seeing you in the discussion forums.
Mike, Akos, & Robert

Mon 13 Apr 2015 3:00 PM PET