How is Simulink different from MatLab? Do you know what your kid will learn? What will they need to do with it?
In the back of my mind, I knew that Simulink was a new approach to solving problem sets. I knew that it was going to take some adjusting to use it for Simulink because it didn’t have the way matlab did, where you can turn it into a language you can type in. So I thought I would use it as a platform to get my students to see if they could make an object-oriented language that they could type in and then turn into a simulation so that they could create their own software.
We actually did the first part of the XCP Communications in Simulink project with MatLab and did some modeling. Then we took some of our student’s and made them get a couple of text books, a few articles that would give them some ideas for solving problems in simulink. They also took some pictures and watched videos that showed how problems are solved in simulink.
That was really the process that helped me learn more about XCP Communications in Simulink. I realized that it was very similar to what they were doing in MatLab and I started working with the student who was really good at solving problems in MatLab.
What kind of learning do you get from working with XCP Communications in Simulink? Do you ever want to rework the process? Does it get boring?
I definitely learned that it can be very exciting to do this. Because of the fact that I had worked with MatLab, I could create the computer language in MatLab, so they have all the language that they would expect. But when it comes to using these objects in simulink, it is all done using the same language. The object is always the same.
What I found interesting about working with Simulink was that I really wasn’t learning anything new. And when I would try to do something differently, it felt like I was learning something new. But this wasn’t something I was doing deliberately to make my students excited.
In working with XCP Communications in Simulink, I got to realize that you can learn things without being able to create the language. For example, to solve problems in simulink, you need to learn all the information you need about the simulation. So you learn all the concepts that you would need to solve problems in simulink. So you’re doing a great job of learning the basics of Simulink.
In order to see that you have really learned something, you need to make sure that you look at the object’s code and get yourself familiar with all the basic things about the simulation in Simulink. You need to make sure that you can reproduce the simulation and ask yourself how you could have solved the problem differently. And then you need to figure out how to make the object do something differently. Because in order to understand what the problem was, you have to solve it differently.
So this is the process I used in order to make sure that I learned something new about XCP Communications in Simulink. The process that really helped me to learn is the one that allowed me to create a language that I could type in and turn into a simulation. We really could have made the language by hand because the process wasn’t that complicated. In the end, though, the fact that we created it on the computer was a huge advantage because it helped us learn how to do it in the simulator. Instead of typing in a bunch of stuff to learn how to do something different, we had a very easy way to learn it by creating a language.