Development of an interactive CDROM-based tutorial for teaching MATLAB

This paper describes the development of an interactive computer-based tutorial for MATLAB. This tutorial has been developed for undergraduate or graduate students who have had little or no exposure to MATLAB. Students are guided through new concepts and syntax with useful aids such as audio, video and interactive exercises. The exercises, implemented in a specially designed exercise window, give the students an opportunity to use MATLAB to solve problems immediately after covering new concepts. The exercise window has a background interface to MATLAB and thus all commands entered in the window are executed by MATLAB. Hints, example solutions, multiple choice quizzes and test problems, requiring the use of proper MATLAB structure and syntax, add to the learning experience. This project was initially undertaken to investigate student response to alternate computer-based teaching methods. Thus student input has played an important part in the development of this tutorial. Subjective feedback from students, which is presented in the paper, indicate great promise for this alternate approach to teaching MATLAB.