Turbocharging MATLABR for the classroom

Many of us have used MATLAB, or similar software packages, as a teaching tool in the classroom to demonstrate concepts and relationships using simple text and graphics output. Though simple text/graphics help bridge the gap between a maze of equations and fundamental insight, they typically fall short of immersing the student in an interactive, animated environment where self-directed learning can take place. From our experience, for students to obtain rapid insight into concepts such as convolution or rotating magnetic fields in an AC machine, they really need more than a passive demonstration. Our work here is based on the premise that intuition will be better facilitated through visualization and interaction. With the use of MATLAB Handle Graphics^(TM) system and external interfaces, we show how an environment can be built for visualization of abstract subject matter through interactive graphs, animation, and real-time/real-signal acquisition, analysis, and graphing. We document our successes starting with an introduction to some of the powerful attributes of MATLAB. Examples are provided for the Electrical Engineering classroom including: “sliding” signals in convolution or correlation; animating the interactions between rotating magnetic fields inside a motor; real-time “house” diagrams (real and imaginary power) from actual parallel generator operations; and, an interactive display of a vessel autopilot system