MATLAB session

I was a bit nervous about it! If you change a well-tried assignment profoundly you can only hope all goes well. When I made my assignment a MATLAB exercise I booked in an hour in a computer room so the students could pop in and ask for help with any of the problems they might have run into. And then that hour came!

 Example script

Fifteen students (of 39) showed up. Two of these had not even accessed the assignment, in spite of me mentioning this would NOT be an opportunity to do the entire assignment. This was for asking help with issues encountered along the way! Those who have not travelled the way don't know what issues they may encounter. But those who expect all students to listen to such warning is very naive.

Most students came to do just what I had warned them against: make the input files for the scripts. What can you do. At least it was easy to sort out any issues! I answered some questions about the format of one of the input files (some students were taking random averages and making garbled files, allegedly because "someone had said" that that was the way to do it; not encouraging but at least I could sort them out) and one extra demonstrator we had hired for his knowledge of MATLAB sorted out a student who did not want to make an input file as I had instructed, but preferred to adapt the MATLAB script to using his file rather than the other way around. No problem!

I hope all goes well! When the hour was over at least these 15 were on their way, but there were still 10 students who had not started at all. I hope they gather sufficient speed later on! But I first had other concerns: it was time to go home and think of entirely different things. It was time to go hiking... watch this space!