Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Open Access Master's Report
Degree Name
Master of Science in Computer Science (MS)
Administrative Home Department
Department of Computer Science
Advisor 1
Charles Wallace
Committee Member 1
Laura Brown
Committee Member 2
Jon Sticklen
Abstract
Novice programmers, considered to be those who have yet to understand the fundamentals of programming, exist in both engineering and computing fields. Within computing, various resources exist to help novice programmers understand fundamentals and style guidelines such as WebTA, a code critique program that gives Java students feedback about their error and style issues. There is, however, a gap in automated code critique for MATLAB, a programming language that is popular in the engineering community. When it comes to MATLAB, there are not many programs that help novices understand their errors, and even fewer that help them understand style guidelines. To help assist these engineering novices, I created a program called MatlabTA. Based on feedback from Engineering Fundamentals instructors on the most common errors they encounter in student code, MatlabTA exists to give novices more intuitive feedback for a few of the most common MATLAB errors, along with providing them different style guidelines for different MATLAB antipatterns such as inconsistent tabbing and function output variable matching. This report will provide an overview of the process in developing MatlabTA, along with examples of the different outputs the application produces.
Recommended Citation
Walther, Marissa L., "MatlabTA: A Style Critiquer For Novice Engineering Students", Open Access Master's Report, Michigan Technological University, 2020.