2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Significant research exists demonstrating the benefits of active and inquiry-based instruction for student engagement, learning, and knowledge retention. The emergence of ever improving software tools provide instructors valuable resources for developing virtual activities to be used within lecture courses, or in place of physical laboratory experiments. This paper describes the use of the MATLAB Live Editor for creating interactive live scripts. These live scripts combine code, formatted text, graphics, and live controls such as numeric sliders, buttons, and drop-down lists, for the creation of lectures and virtual activities that illustrate complex topics through interactive figures and animations. When deployed as in-class activities for students and as interactive homework assignments, students are able to build intuition for course material and construct meaning for themselves. This paper provides techniques and examples for developing and employing live scripts for teaching a range of topics from mathematics, engineering, and science. The author has piloted these techniques in online and in-person courses related to modeling and control over the past two years at University of Detroit Mercy. Student survey data from the winter 2023 semester indicates students found significant value from the live script activities implemented in their course.