I am a B-Tech student in University of Calicut, Kerala, India. The lab syllabus of final year electronics engineering contains “Experiments Using Matlab” which are a set of three experiments to be done using Matlab. In our college we are using Matlab. Since proprietary softwares like Matlab are not recommended in universities (see this Why schools should exclusively use free software), it is goodto use free software Octave. As I am a free software enthusiast, I love using octave instead of Matlab.
If I ask the lab staff to use Octave in the college lab, they will ask me “Will all programs work in Octave?”. Actually they are not happy to accept Octave because it is not mentioned in syllabus. Is it compulsory that students should learn only what is in the syllabus? The other true fact is that, at the end of semester there will be a lab exam. The teachers coming from other college won’t be familiar with Octave. So when they see Octave, they will surely ask to install Matlab.
One of the method to bring free software in B-Tech course (not only in B-Tech, but also in other courses) is to have a syllabus review. Thereby all will start using free software. If the syllabus changes there should be reference materials for these free software tools. The first thing everyone does if he/she doesn’t know about something is that he/she will Google it. So I thought of contributing once again to free software by writing some tutorials for Octave that can be helpful for implementing free software like Octave in universities.
These all led me to write this tutorial. This tutorial is about installing Octave and also contains some examples using Octave. I have tried to write the tutorial in a simple and lucid way. Hope this tutorial can guide university to use octave in their labs instead of Matlab.
The tutorial here explains the simple example code that can be used for teaching Octave. This tutorial is specifically designed for University of Calicut in India. But I hope the syllabus will be almost same in other universities also.
The tutorial is in my Wiki page. You can visit the tutorial from the link below
Experiments using Octave for B-Tech course
Jeffrey, Nice effort.
It will be good if you add some screenshots to that wiki.
@ Santhosh Thottingal : Thanks…
There are screen shots in the wiki. The wiki can be accessed from
http://jeffrey.co.in/wiki/doku.php/experiments_using_octave_for_b-tech_course
Hi Jeffrey, Just stumbled upon your page. I feel (at least from my own experience) this has been the case for some years, universities which should be the torch bearers of change, in fact become the enforcers of status-quo and the main force behind preventing all kinds of innovations. Don’t know, whether great places of learning are only in history - a myth? (think of great places of learning like ancient universities of Greece, India etc.).
In fact teachers/lecturer’s should be the first to point out alternative ways. I always been interested in open source software (still remember the thrill I got when I ran X-Windows on my 386 many years back, when not many people were even heard of Linux).
But I feel voices like yours were there always, to prove that, there is a world beyond the ‘official’ world prescribed by syllabus.
Great effort … and wuold like to read more from you…