Tips From Your TAs


 

Announcements

The Lab Hours schedule has changed.  Please check the Profs, TAs and Office Hours page.  The new hours go into effect on Monday, April 16.

 

 A few notes on homework...
  1. Please, please read the professional quality standards on the EA3 homework page. They benefit us AND YOU. It's very unlikely that we'll feel like being nice while grading unprofessional homework.
  2. Staple. No paper clips, folds, nails, bolts, string, spiral bindings, or otherwise. Staple. If you need a huge stapler, there's one in the ME department office. Stapleless staples would be awesome.
  3. Box your answers
  4. Include units
  5. 4 comes after 3. 6 comes after 5. Don't put problem 3 after problem 5. Put problems IN ORDER, even if they're Matlab.
  6. We love it when you try to be super organized, but if you're going to type equations, you need to type them with an equation editor of some kind. You can do this with MathType or Equation Editor in MS Word, or if you want to get crazy organized and produce incredibly professional documents, check out TeX.
  7. Only use one side of a paper. With Matlab code, you may print two pages on a single side to save paper.



 

Homework checklist



Matlab Tips

If you don't know what one of the commands is that we refer to in here, type help or doc and then the name of the command into the Matlab command window. For example, help clc or doc clc

Another good Matlab reference from NU is found here.
Here is another one from Brigham Young University.

An example .m file that uses a lot of these tips is available here.

  1. Draw free body diagrams and write your equations BEFORE going to code
  2. Comment your code gratuitously
  3. Put clear all; close all; clc; at the beginning of your code.
  4. Instead of flipping between the command window, your code, and your figures, you can click the little curved arrow up in the title bar to compress them into one window. You can also click and drag the subwindows around.
  5. From your .m file, you can push F5 to Save and Run your program
  6. If you get stuck in an "infinite loop" where your code never stops, destroy the computer, find a new one, and rebuild your code. Or press Ctrl-C. Either method works.
  7. If you don't like the default axes sizes, use the commands axis or xlim and ylim
  8. To put several plots into one figure, use the subplot command.
  9. Do not plot two variables of different units on the same axis. For example, don't plot distance (units of meters) and velocity (units of meters/second). To avoid this, either plot them on different plots using subplot or use plotyy
  10. Always label axes and give a very descriptive title on your Matlab plot (e.g. My Name : EA3 HW5 : Problem 6-3 : x_6 and v_6 of Bernice)
  11. To get a figure into a Word document, use Edit -> Copy Figure
  12. To print text to the command window, use disp ('your text goes here') You can also do stuff like disp ( [ 'some_variable = ', num2str(some_variable) ] ), where some_variable is a variable in your code
  13. To get variables to show up in text (like in a graph title or axis label), use num2str
  14. Don't worry about manually indenting your code. Just Select All and then press ctrl-i to auto indent.
  15. Use a switch statement to only execute certain parts of code. Click here for example code.
  16. Use the input command to request information from the user during execution of your code. Click here for example code.



 

General class tips

  • Take a look now at the examples of the next quiz. This would help you know what topics are considered important so that you really focus on understanding them as they come up in class.
  • Note that it helps YOU if we are picky about grading, meaning we take off points for the little things. It gets your attention that you made a mistake so that you don't make it again. Meanwhile, the homework doesn't really count for that much, so it doesn't really hurt your grade, but it does help you on the exams, where the little things can lose you a lot of points. So when you get points off on your homework, go over it to make sure you understand why, talk to a TA if you don't understand why, and don't fret over a few homework points.
  • DON'T PANIC on the quizzes. We give you as much time as you need, so you shouldn't panic when you look at the quiz problems and don't automatically know how to do them off the top of your head - much of what we want students to learn in EA3 is how to look at a problem not quite like they've ever seen before and figure out how to solve it from the basic priniciples you've learned. It can be helpful to just begin by writing down the general equations that apply to the problem and whatever you can figure out, then stop and figure out what, mathematically, you are trying to find and then see if you can figure out how to get from what you have to what you're aiming for.



 

Engineering on the web


Here are a few sites that can inform or entertain you as an engineer.

 

 

 

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