Work in Progress: Development of MATLAB Instructional Modules for Engineering Students

Abstract

As an engineering technical software, MATLAB has become an immensely popular tool in both academia and industry. It is widely used as a software supplement to many courses in the College of Engineering at Villanova University. On the other hand, instructors of different courses have to spend time introducing MATLAB repeatedly. And instructors are usually left to a very fragmental teaching of MATLAB tools needed for a specific project in a course. Moreover, being focused on the fundamentals of the course, the instructors usually do not have much time to explain the details of MATLAB. This leaves students frustrated and unaware where to seek the information needed. In order to address these issues, we developed video-based instructional modules that systematically introduced fundamental MATLAB skills that are related to the curricula offered in engineering, especially in the Mechanical and Chemical Engineering departments. With these modules available online for students, instructors don’t need to repeatedly introduce MATLAB in their courses. The students can either systematically learn MATLAB or just study the modules that are related to their courses.

Seventeen video-based modules were developed in this project to introduce MATLAB and provide application examples of MATLAB to solve problems in data process and display, curve fitting, basic statistics, linear algebra, linear and nonlinear algebraic equations, integration and differentiation, ordinary differential equations (solved in both command window and Simulink format), partial differential equations, process control (including transfer function, Laplace transfer, and PID controller design), and animation. Each module includes a 15-20-minute video recording of a short lecture in which the instructor discussed a particular MATLAB feature augmented by several related examples detailing the development and implementation of the particular MATLAB script. These modules were widely implemented in courses in the departments of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering in the 2017-2018 academic year at Villanova University.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed modules in facilitating students’ learning, an anonymous college-wide survey was conducted via Survey Monkey in May 2018. The survey included five general questions that were focused on evaluating the improvement of student’s overall learning, student’s conceptual understanding of principles and courses, students' ability to apply knowledge in solving real-world problems. The effectiveness of the videos in motivating student’s learning and conveying the materials was also evaluated in the survey. In addition to the college-wide survey, another anonymous survey was conducted in the course Chemical Process Control for a course-specific study of the MATLAB implementation in improving students’ skills in math-intensive techniques. While students generally provided positive feedback on the developed modules, they did provide feedback on further improving the video-based teaching format. The survey results will be discussed in detail in this work. The results will be of value in providing suggestions on implementing video-based teaching format in educating students’ programming and math skills.