Date
TBA, December 2025
Duration
40 hrs / 1.4 ECTs (48 hrs / 1.7 ECTs incl. introductory day)
Location
VU
Organizer
This course is designed to teach participants how to program in Matlab. The course will be mostly self-paced so that people can progress at the speed that is right for them. There will be no common end point, as fast-learner or people that already have more programming experience will learn about more topics or to a deeper level. We end the course with a practical task to solve a real problem using programming.
After following this course students will be able to program in Matlab to an intermediate level. They will: <ul> <li>know the basics of imperative programming, the use of functions and loops</li> <li>be able to read in own data, perform basic quantitative analyses on the data, visualize the results and store them for further analysis.</li> <li>be acquainted with good programming practices and programming in a collaboration.</li> </ul>
The following topics will be covered during the course: <ul> <li>Using the Matlab GUI</li> <li>Basic programming in Matlab (variables, loops, function calls)</li> <li>Data visualization</li> <li>Basic input/output</li> <li>Debugging and code optimization</li> <li>Use of version control and software repositories</li> <li>Solving real-world problems with Matlab</li> </ul>
No prior knowledge is required
<p class="elementor-icon-box-description">There are good introductory books on Matlab available to support you in the course. Here are some suggestions from the organisers:</p> <h6><b>Matlab: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving by Attaway</b>.</h6> Very good introduction up to intermediate level of Matlab programming. Good programming style. Well explained. About 40 euros. Note that this is not the book with a similar name from Upskill Learning. That book is too basic for the course. <h6><b>Essential MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists by Hahn and Valentine.</b></h6> Extensive introduction to Matlab up to intermediate level. About 40 euros. <h6><b>Mastering MATLAB by Hanselman and Littlefield.</b></h6> Very extensive introduction to Matlab up to intermediate level. About 80 euros <h6><b>Matlab for Brain and Cognitive Scientists by Cohen.</b></h6> Extensive book aimed specifically at analysis of neuroscience data, but also providing a good introduction to programming in Matlab. 50 euros. <h6><b>Matlab for Neuroscientists by Wallisch and others.</b></h6> Not a very good introduction to Matlab programming but contains many interesting chapters on neuroscience data analysis. Matlab for Beginners: A Gentle Approach. Very basic. We hope to get further than this book in this course.