Philip Aston recently attended the HEA STEM Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2014: Enhancing the STEM Student Journey which was held in Edinburgh. He gave a talk on “Using Computer Assisted Assessment to Enhance Learning of Matlab Skills“, which is based on his experience of teaching the Modelling and Experiment module to first year students. Almost all mathematics students find their first experience of programming very difficult. Learning to program is like learning to drive a car – it seems really hard to start with, but with practice it becomes easier.

Philip has produced 8 Matlab worksheets to help the students learn Matlab and he has then written some questions using the computer based assessment package Maple TA for the first 6 worksheets, which give the students practice at the skills they are learning. On completion of the Maple TA exercises, students can check which questions they got right or wrong.  Feedback is provided for each question which includes the Matlab code for answering the question. This gives students plenty of opportunity to practice Matlab, provides immediate feedback and also aids their learning for questions that they got wrong. Two tests using the same system are then used to check on their progress.