Improving Problem Solving Skills Through Adapting Programming Tools
Linda H. Shaykhian, Gholam Ali Shaykhian · 2020
Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Improving Problem Solving Skills through Adapting Programming Tools Introduction There are numerous ways for engineers and students to become better problem-solvers. The use of command line and visual programming tools can help to model a problem and formulate a solution through visualization. The analysis of problem attributes and constraints provide insight into the scope and complexity of the problem. The visualization aspect of the problem-solving approach tends to make students and engineers more systematic in their thought process and help them catch errors before proceeding too far in the wrong direction. The problem-solver identifies and defines important terms, variables, rules, and procedures required for solving a problem. Every step required to construct the problem solution can be defined in program commands that produce intermediate output. This paper advocates improved problem solving skills through using a programming tool. MatLab, created by MathWorks, is an interactive numerical computing environment and programming language. It is a matrix-based system that easily lends itself to matrix manipulation and plotting of functions and data. MatLab can be used as an interactive command line or a sequence of commands that can be saved in a file as a script or named functions. Prior programming experience is not required to use MatLab. MatLab visual and command programming are presented here. The GNU Octave, part of the GNU project, a free computer program for performing numerical computations, is comparable to MatLab. MatLab Programming Language The easy-to-use computing environment of MatLab, along with the availability of thousands of built-in functions for mathematics, statistics, simulation, data analysis and general purpose programming, has rendered it a popular software tool for many engineers and scientists in various fields. MatLab is a dynamically typed language [8]. In a dynamically typed language, impending errors are caught at run-time. MATLAB is delivered as part of an integrated computing environment facilitating programming in three different ways, known as shell, script and function. Shell, a single command line typed directly from a keyboard, uses hundreds of pre-built mathematical functions. MatLab programming constructs (decision statements, loop statements, etc.) and pre-built