Teaching Using Octave

[Burke, Dr. Richard]

I know a bit about the history of Octave, and if I’m not mistaken, several faculty have taught courses using Octave. I will be teaching a course called Engineering Analysis in the fall, and I am thinking about basing the course on Octave. The course is for junior level engineers from mechanical, electrical, and related disciplines.

A few questions:

1.      Is there anything published about your experience or the experience of others in using Octave as the computational basis for a course? There are countless books based upon MATLAB, MathCAD, etc.

2.      Is the Octave documentation adequate for undergraduate engineers? I am concerned about having the course devolve into a software tutorial, and like most small college programs, we do not have teaching assistants.

3.      Any advice as to whether (or how) I should do this?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

_______________________

Dr. Richard Burke, '72

Chairman and Professor of Engineering

Maritime College

State University of New York

6 Pennyfield Avenue

Throggs Neck, NY 10465

Voice:  718.409.7411

Fax:    718.409.7421