Overall Course Learning Objectives

The Overall Course Learning Objectives are specific skills that you should obtain by the end of Quarter. Homework assignments, quizzes and exams are designed to measure your attainment of these objectives. Therefore, if you can do each of the following activities very well, then you will get a good grade.

  1. The ability to communicate via email, to download and read on-line course materials, and to participate in on-line discussions about the course.
  2. The ability to write programs in MATLAB that involve loops, logical block constructs (if ... else), plotting, and simple file input/output. The ability to write programs that evaluate and plot analytical functions. The ability to translate numerical algorithms to correct MATLAB programs.
  3. The ability to distinguish between the effects of truncation error and roundoff error in evaluating a finite number of terms in an infinite series.
  4. The ability to define machine precision, underflow limit, and overflow limit and identify the built-in MATLAB variables for these concepts. The ability to use machine precision to construct absolute and relative tolerances for the convergence of iterative computations.
  5. The ability to apply MATLAB programs for finding the zeros of a function of one variable.
  6. The ability to manually perform addition, subtraction, and multiplication operations on vectors and matrices. The ability to manually compute vector norms. The ability to use all of these linear algebra operations in MATLAB programs.
  7. The ability to set up and solve linear systems of equations. The ability to manually perform Gaussian elimination on small systems. The ability to use MATLAB’s backslash operator to correctly compute the solution to a system of linear equations. The ability to interpret the condition number of coefficient matrix for a linear system of equations.
  8. The ability to use MATLAB programs to perform curve fits of data to polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. The ability to use a residual plot from a curve fit as an indicator of whether a better curve fit might be obtainable.
  9. The ability to manually apply Euler’s method, Heun’s method, and the fourth order Runge-Kutta method to advance a single ordinary differential equation for one or two steps of the independent variable. The ability to use MATLAB programs to obtain numerical solutions to ordinary differential equations.