Tools and Resources for Educators: Teaching Quantitative Thinking in
Geoscience with MATLAB
Abstract
Computational geoscience courses often combine domain science, math,
programming, and hardware instrumentation. Ensuring students master all
those skills can be daunting for professors, as well as for students who
tackle these hybrid classes. Through a series of 3-day in-person
workshops, faculty across the geoscience disciplines and allied science
fields have collaborated to produce on-line teaching resources and a
community of peers to support these multi-faceted but essential
Geoscience courses. These resources support Geoscience and Science
educators seeking to update their curriculum and even create whole new
courses. Topics addressed include approaches to teaching, best practices
for working group design, empowering students to self-advocate, building
computational skills optimally, and coordinating curriculum across a
department and even cross-departments. This e-lightning talk will show
the resources available to educators – teaching activities including
MATLAB code, presentations on teaching approaches, and course
curriculum, among others. It will also highlight relevant MathWorks
tools for learning and teaching, from online videos, to free,
interactive MATLAB tutorials (MATLAB Onramp and more), to autograding
software for MATLAB code (MATLAB Grader), with associated publicly
available homework problem sets. Attendees will learn where and how to
access these online resources, share their teaching challenges, and
participate in future workshops.