3-3 An Approach to Teaching Programming to Geology Students: Understanding Geodynamics Through MATLAB

Session: Advancements in undergraduate education: connecting classrooms to research and careers in sustainable geology

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Abstract:

A comprehensive suite of MATLAB labs are presented that successfully establish an on-ramp for geoscience students with no prior programming experience to become proficient in programming in MATLAB by the end of an academic semester. The collection of twelve labs were developed for an undergraduate/graduate course in Geodynamics as part of my NSF CAREER award modeling subduction dynamics along the Ring of Fire. The MATLAB labs systematically increase in programming and geodynamic complexity as the semester progresses. Designing the labs around physics-based concepts and data sets from the Geodynamics course facilitates the design and implementation steps of the software development method. Students write every line of code by themselves during lab time, avoiding a black-box approach to the programming gateway. In addition, each lab is completed during the lab time, thus students are not left alone with broken code, which can be a major impediment for novice users. Although the lab collection is designed for students with no prior programming experience, students with prior experience have opportunities to deepen their programming skills with direct applications to geodynamics-based problems. Students become proficient in programming in MATLAB by the end of the semester, writing codes with logical statements, nested loops, automated plot and output file naming, and an understanding of directory structure. The systematic design and layout of the programming-lab collection makes the labs easily portable to other upper level-undergraduate and graduate geoscience courses.

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