Interactive Coding Templates for Courses and Undergraduate Research Using MATLAB Live Scripts

Undergraduate students in core chemical engineering courses spend a significant amount of time solving problems. For courses or research experiences early in undergraduate study, students generally have not yet taken advanced mathematics, numerical methods, or programming courses, making it challenging to address realistic problems without such tools. The resources provided in this paper aim to enable students, who are still in the early parts of their curriculum, to solve realistic problems in their coursework or research with the aid of faculty-provided interactive coding templates built in the MATLAB live script format. These files combine executable MATLAB code, formatted explanatory text and equations, images, and code output directly in a single file. Here, these MATLAB live scripts are referred to more generically as interactive coding templates because they could alternatively be provided in other coding languages (such as Jupyter Notebooks for Python or Julia). The paper details a set of interactive coding templates for use in training undergraduate students in the introductory chemical engineering material and energy balances course and in an undergraduate research experience on the topic of biomedical applications of systems engineering tools. Each interactive coding template provides background information about the topic, the equations or a diagram defining the technique, an example problem with worked solution, and fully functional code that can solve the example problem and can be extended to new problems that use the same types of numerical methods.