Teaching Signal Analysis Using Scientific Notebook

Abstract

At Murdoch University we offer a signal analysis unit to undergraduate students in mathematics and physics. In the teaching of signal analysis at this level it is essential that students see and generate the signals that are being presented. For this reason it is beneficial to both the student and the teacher to have available a program that is easy to implement and that gives immediate on-screen plots. This is where Scientific Notebook comes into its own. With this software package we can easily generate standard sinusoidal functions and see them on the screen, making it straightforward to explain and understand terms such as period and frequency. However, it isn't immediately clear how to automatically generate line graphs for the corresponding discrete versions, especially as Scientific Notebook has no programming facility. We also have to consider the different behaviour of the MAPLE (Scientific Notebook versions 4 and earlier) and MuPAD (Scientific Notebook versions 4 and later) computation engines. In this paper we will outline, in the teaching context, our approach to these questions and present some algorithms for generating a wide range of discrete signals.