Re: octave tutorial

[Andy Adler]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Brian Blais wrote:

> While we're on the topic of teaching using Octave, I am going to be
> using octave this fall semester for teaching an intro to programming
> course.  I have written a lab manual of sorts, which you can have a look
> at.  http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais/octave
>
> I took an approach which I haven't seen for octave or matlab before.
> Rather than jump into matrices immediately, I treat the language as any
> other, introducing the language structures first, and then vectors and
> matrices later. It's still a bit rough, and kind of drops off at the
> end, but it is a work in progress and may be useful to someone out there.

There is a big debate in our department (like many others) as to
the choice of language to teach intro to computers. The current winner
is Java.

When I want to give my computer science colleagues a _nudge_, I
suggest that they should use Matlab/Octave. It normally gets them
quite upset, even though it would actually be a fairly good choice,
since it has all the beginer features without many of the strange
complexities. Additionally, many 3rd and 4th year electrical
engineering courses assume the students can use Matlab - but it
is never taught to them.

I'm surprised that you could get a choice for octave through the
politics. How did you do it?

--
Andy Adler <address@hidden> 1(613)562-5800x6218



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