Sean‘s pick this week is The Ideal Gas Law, Data, and Footballs by Daniel Frey.

With the New England Patriots sitting on top of the AFC, looking forward to a bye week, and home field advantage through the playoffs, I think it’s time for another football related pick of the week. This one is a live script that shows the use of statistics and the ideal gas law to attempt to explain what happened during AFC Championship in 2015 when the team was accused of tampering with the footballs.

I really like the way Daniel has used the live script as a way to teach a lesson. Just like in the documentation example (scroll down to Create interactive lectures for teaching), he has done some of the calculations, and then left open ended questions for students to fill in with either text or code. Students could then return the document so he can run it.

During the first semester I TA’d MATLAB, the instructor was having everyone turn on the diary, doing all of the calculations (with semicolons off!), and then saving the diary output. This meant there were no graphics, plain text only, and all typos showed up making the diaries really long, and hard to digest. The workflow with the Live Script is a big improvement in every way.

If you teach with MATLAB, how do you have students hand in course work? Live scripts could be a good approach to look at as well as MATLAB Grader for autograding, borrowing or sharing problems with others, and integrating with your learning management systems.

Now if you’re less interested in teaching and more interested in football, also be sure to check out this blog post from 2015 that uses Simulink to simulate the pressure changes over the game.

Comments

Give it a try and let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Daniel.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2017a