Video games are not inherently evil. They are not the enemy, and they are not leading to the downfall of society as we know it. True, one could find many negative qualities in several titles, but that can be accomplished in any given medium of communication, storytelling, and entertainment. Instead of blanket vilifying games, we should look at
what they do well in capturing and retaining attention, rewarding progress, and promoting motivation. If we can learn how to emulate these qualities in the classroom, we might find ourselves with a more enthusiastic and motivated classroom.

It is the quintessence of science, engineering, and numerous other disciplines to make quantitative observations, record them, and then try to make some sense out of the resulting dataset. Quite often, the latter is an easy task, due either to practiced familiarity with the domain or to the fact that the goals of the exercise are undemanding. However, when working at the frontiers of knowledge, this is not the case. Here, one encounters unknown territory, with maps that are sometimes poorly defined and always incomplete.

Multimeters are the electrical engineer’s swiss army knife. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to check for continuity, measure resistance and measure voltage. These measurements are really handy to have in your bag of tricks if you are messing around with electronics.

TEX is a computer program created by Donald E. Knuth [2]. It is aimed at typesetting text and mathematical formulae. Knuth started writing the TEX typesetting engine in 1977 to explore the potential of the digital printing equipment that was beginning to infiltrate the publishing industry at that time, especially in the hope that he could reverse the trend of deteriorating typographical quality that he saw affecting his own books and articles. TEX as we use it today was released in 1982, with some slight enhancements added in 1989 to better support 8-bit characters and multiple languages. TEX is renowned for being extremely stable, for running on many different kinds of computers, and for being virtually bug free.

This tutorial is available as a supplement to the textbook Fundamentals of Signals and Systems Using Matlab by Edward Kamen and Bonnie Heck, published by Prentice Hall. The tutorial covers basic MATLAB commands that are used in introductory signals and systems analysis. It is meant to serve as a quick way to learn MATLAB and a quick reference to the commands that are used in this textbook.