Teaching Statistics With MATLAB: How and Why?

Teaching statistics with software is a practical approach for introducing students to real world problems and how to analyse data. There are different choices of software for teaching statistics, however R and SPSS have been the most common choices. This has often caused a dilemma for students and researchers who have an engineering background and may prefer to do most of their analysis within MATLAB instead of learning a new programming language they may not use often. This paper explores lesson learned from creating a new MATLAB short course and some useful tools for teaching statistics using MATLAB.