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Tools and Resources for Educators: Teaching Quantitative Thinking in Geoscience with MATLAB
  • Lisa Kempler,
  • Cathryn Manduca,
  • Mitchell Awalt
Lisa Kempler
MathWorks, Inc.

Corresponding Author:lisa.kempler@mathworks.com

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Cathryn Manduca
Carleton College
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Mitchell Awalt
Carleton College
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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.