Workshop: Activity Centric Learning and Teaching with MATLAB - Module 1

This workshop will engage participants in the first module of five from the activity centric pedagogy developed for a first-year Computer Programming for Engineers class. The pedagogy is designed to gently build Excel, math, and programming skills through purely active learning. Module 1 spans five, ninety-minute lectures that start with the hands-on activity, "Bungee Action Figure." The author has been working with MathWorks® to create self-paced Live Scripts for teaching programming in MATLAB®. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop pre-loaded with Excel and MATLAB®. However, an online MATLAB® account will also work well. This course is taught to first-year students at the university and juniors and seniors at four regional high schools. K-12 teachers and first-year engineering instructors are the target audiences for this workshop. The goal is for attendees to walk away with the ability to lead their students through the material in their own courses. During the workshop, participants will engage in the "Bungee" activity for approximately 20 minutes to collect data. The author will then demonstrate how she uses the data to reinforce linear mathematical modeling skills and lines of best fit (Lecture 2), gently introduce the students to Excel (Lecture 3), and how she guides students to use the data in the self-paced MATLAB Live Script which gently introduces them to the MATLAB IDE and basic coding (Lecture 4). The fifth lecture in the module uses the data to introduce students to the linear least squares fitting technique and the equations for calculating the slope, y-intercept and the correlation coefficient.