Guiding students online in learning to code

Since several years an engineer and a mathematician offer the course "Simulation of transportation processes using Matlab" for master students of process and power engineering. This is an interdisciplinary course where the students will get an elementary introduction to numerics and coding in Matlab/Octave, will repeat the modelling of heat flow and steady Rankine processes and combine this in some Matlab scripts. This blended course already engaged the students to work independently but to meet every two weeks for discussion and get support in programming. For the two weeks between the sessions we have prepared learning modules provided in our LMS ILIAS, which the students have to prepare. This is basis for the discussion in the presence meetings. In this learning modules, e.g. the 1d heat transfer was introduced and in parallel the idea of the finite differences of first and second order. For this a loop back was done to the engineering mathematics courses 1 and 2.

All this we turned now into a pure online course, in particular the coding sessions. Some adjustments we have done, so we offered a weekly question hour. The main headline about all is: Getting the students in to action.

At the end we have to state, that this year the students were more active and discussed the models much more deeply then before.

This course is held together with Micheal Wensing (Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics).