MATLAB: a computing playground

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hi. I’m Paul Kassebaum. I have global responsibility at MathWorks for working with physicists. I work at MathWorks because I want scientists and science students to be able to play through computation.
• #4: Raise your hand if your students have fun doing signal analysis. This is an exhibit at the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum, founded by Robert Oppenheimer. Yes, that Oppenheimer.
• #5: Here’s another way to play with frequencies. After playing with these signals long enough in MATLAB, the LIGO team earned themselves a Nobel prize for physics.
• #6: Computational literacy lays the ground for scientists to play. MATLAB makes playing with data, algorithms, models, and theories easier to play with, in the same way the Exploratorium’s exhibit enables kids of all ages to play with the spectrum of light. MATLAB is a playground for scientists. Computational literacy looks like play. Think of what it means to be fluent in a second language. You can make jokes, write poetry, play with the language to discover new connections as you think with the language. Playing is thinking.
• #8: I’m going to focus on these aspects. It’s complicated, but these go a long way.
• #9: Need typing skills to think in words on a computer
• #15: Oppenheimer thought that the distance between not being able to read and reading is orders of magnitude larger than that between being able to read and solving ODEs. Why? Because once you can read, you have a language to ask questions about how to solve ODEs.
• #17: How do you get work graded? How do you share and collect open ended work?
• #30: I’m going to focus on these aspects. It’s complicated, but these go a long way.