271019 The Big Calculator – A HandsOn Matlab-Introduction for Neuro-Scientists (BS) (WiSe 2016/2017)

In this seminar a basic introduction to programming by the example of Matlab will be given. Fundamental skills required for typical programming task in context of psychology will be taught, e.g. analysis of huge amounts of data or the control of computer-aided experiment.

Although this seminar is primarily an introduction to Matlab, occasionally some brief excursions to other programming languages will be given, with the intend to ease the transfer of the acquired skills to other languages.

The seminar will be held in English.

Topics which will be treated:

- The Matlab Window
- Function-Browser.
- Command-Line.
- Workspace.
- Toolbar.

- Variables
- What is a variable?
- How to use a variable?
- Saving and loading the matlab workspace.

- Data-types (double, char, array, struct, cell-array)
- Which data types exist?
- Which properties do these data types have?

- Basic operations on data types

- Array access (indexing, masking)
- How to save time with clever designed array access.
- Boolean-operations (larger, smaller, equal)

- Error-Handling
- Don‘t Panic!
- How do error messages emerge?
- Taunting error messages.
- How to read error messages and find and fix the error.

- Control-structures (for-, while-loop, if … else)
- How to control the course of a program?

- Data-visualisation/Plots
- Some basic plots in Matlab and how to use them.

- Functions and scripts
- How to save code for later use.

- Linear Algebra in Matlab
- How can I do in Matlab what my old math teacher tried to tell me about matrices and their operations?

- Reading and writing files
- Reading data from xls-, txt-, csv-files.
- Writing data to a file.