Student Usage of Small Auto-graded MATLAB Coding Exercises

Abstract

Nikitha Sambamurthy completed her Ph.D. in engineering education at Purdue University in 2017. Nikitha works with zyBooks, a startup that develops interactive, web-native textbooks for college courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.

Analyzing the Use of Embedded MATLAB® Laboratory Problems in an Online Interactive Textbook

“…Figure 1 depicts the coding environment for the MATLAB ® labs. This environment has also been previously described in "Student Usage of Small Auto-Graded MATLAB ® Coding Exercises'' (Edgcomb, Sambamurthy, & Gulvady, 2018). The coding environment for MATLAB ® labs consists of three parts: the prompt, the starter code, and the assessment.…”

“…The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic only further hastened the number of classes that needed to utilize online platforms for classroom teaching and grading. A previous paper detailed the use of auto-graded MATLAB ® coding exercises embedded within a section of an online textbook, focusing on the section content (Edgcomb, Sambamurthy, & Gulvady, 2018;Kecskemety, Parris, & Sattele, 2019). However, larger programming problems often draw on content across multiple sections within a chapter, or even multiple chapters.…”

“…While research has been done on the use of auto-graded coding coding exercises for introductory programming courses for languages such as C and C++ (Sharrock, et al, 2019;Allen, et al, 2018;Rao, 2019), limited research exists specific to the MATLAB ® programming language and the use of autograding. Previous research on the use of MATLAB ® autograding in first-year engineering courses has been mostly focused on the use of smaller practice problems testing one particular concept (Edgcomb, Sambamurthy, & Gulvady, 2018;Kecskemety, Parris, & Sattele, 2019). Ex: A programming problem on creating a while loop to accomplish a task.…”