Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

MATLAB’s use has grown from academic research into use as a generalized tool for various applications, but the field of computing does not widely use it. Computer science and engineering departments often choose a language for the lessons it can teach about programming languages, rather than choosing it for real work. Some claim that MATLAB knowledge can make learning another language harder for computer science and engineering beginners with no programming knowledge. Some also claim that MATLAB does not provide a mental model of what the code does. Computer scientists and engineers must understand what the code should do and imagine the data structures. In this paper, we propose applying a recently proposed modeling language called a thinging machine (TM) to help teach MATLAB to computer engineers and scientists as an introductory programming language. This paper presents some MATLAB examples in a TM as they are applied in actual lectures. The initial results indicate potential advantages of TM in this context.