For me the best is when something gets taught by writing simple programs. I don't like long abstract concepts, but rather keep it short and practical. I don't k

For me the best is when something gets taught by writing simple programs. I don't like long abstract concepts, but rather keep it short and practical. I don't know Matlab, but lets say you're teaching 'C'. 1 - hello world 2 - program to add two hardcoded numbers, display result 3 - program to accept two numbers, and write out result (same as #2, only process 'argc'). 4 - program to write 'hello world' to file. 5 - program to read entire file into memory (hard-code buffer size to be big enough), and write it out to screen between '(' and ')'. 6 - something with a while loop, possibly reading any sized file, and printing it to screen line at a time, prefixed with line number 7 - for loop perhaps finding sum of all numbers between 1 and 100. 8 - some basic functions 9 - etc., one small step at a time. That's what would work for me. People who are smart are going to pick up on what you're doing and get ahead. People who aren't so smart won't get too lost. The last thing I would say, is not to assume audience knows anything. For example, I would stay away from writing a checkers game - there are different ways to play it, people will argue, some maybe never even played it. Chess would turn off some people right away. Keep problems simple.