MATLAB Live Editor: A Scientific Computing Playground for Students

Students developing computational literacy need the fundamental skills for play, immediate feedback, and multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement. This video shows how the MATLAB Live Editor fulfills all of these needs in the context of a short curriculum example. In the example, students are tasked with analyzing data they collected from an introductory physics lab and connecting their observations to theory using computational skills. 

The lab entails measuring the time vs. position of an object freely falling from rest, fitting the data to a quadratic equation of undetermined coefficients, and characterizing the noise of the sensor as interpreted as the standard deviation of the residuals of the data from the fitted curve. Many of the latest features of MATLAB^® live scripts are demonstrated in the natural flow of exploring the problem.

One aspect of MATLAB live scripts that stood out in the workshop for many educators was the ability to easily edit plots by pointing and clicking, and then having MATLAB generate code to replicate the effect for use as a script or function. The educators found this compelling because they saw this as an on-ramp for students to transition from pointing and clicking to writing algorithms. The demonstration highlights this MATLAB code generation capability for other point-and-click workflows as well, such as data importing and curve fitting.