TEACHING ENGINEERING SUBJECTS USING MATLAB

A required course on programming in MATLAB has been included in the undergraduate programs at Ariel University Center of Samaria since 2000. In the Department of Civil Engineering, students attend a one-semester course in MATLAB in the first year of the program. The course syllabus includes 26 hours of lectures and 26 hours of tutorials. The students learn elementary mathematical commands, functions for vector and matrix operations, logic operators, methods for solving systems of linear equations, graphics, symbolic operations, input-output functions, and other operations. In the MATLAB course, which is taught by a faculty member of the department, students master the methodology of using MATLAB for solving real engineering problems. Throughout their undergraduate studies, students apply their skills in programming to topics related to structural engineering subjects. MATLAB has proved itself to be a very effective tool in the educational process because it offers a simple and powerful tool for analyzing and visualizing results of numerical simulations and measurements. Its universality allows easy understanding of complicated processes in different fields of engineering, forming a basis for greater success in education.