Is this a semester long course? Since you're teaching computational biology it sounds like it'd be similar to the engineer introduction to programming with Matl

Is this a semester long course? Since you're teaching computational biology it sounds like it'd be similar to the engineer introduction to programming with Matlab that I had to take my freshman year with no programming experience. It's probably going to run like this: Tomorrow you'll be introducing how to get Matlab installed, and basically how to get running. No one did this before hand except for 2-3 kids. You'll do hello world, then make a helloworld.m file and half the class will be confused. If you can add 2 numbers, make a variable, and concatenate a string I think you'll be in good shape. Remembering back to my intro engineering class, loops and specifically arrays are the hardest things to get in an intro programming class. It's "omg hard" level for them right now, even though Matlab does a bunch of the heavy lifting for you. While loops, for loops that increment by more than 1,and do-while loops are where they might struggle. One of the most fun things we had to do for a project was using Matlab to manipulate audio files. Speed up, slow down, or make the tracks louder or softer. You can also do mixes using it. It's all array operations and then they can save the result to a file. I still have my quadruple speed mp3 on my computer from a 7 years ago.