Tag Archives: Excel

Lecture 2 – Orbital Mechanics Review A

If you haven’t already signed up; please submit your email to receive notifications and updates about the course.

[contact-form][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”1″ /][/contact-form]

Lecture

We review orbital mechanics and Newton’s law of gravitation to prepare for orbit determination. We will cover the two body problem, orbital elements, and perturbing accelerations. We won’t finish the entire lecture today. We will continue on Monday.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBekNtOqy-k]

Previous Lectures

Lecture 1

Resources

Lecture 2 – Orbital Mechanics Review A

Lecture 1 – Orbit Determination Concepts (slides)

AppendixA-ProbabilityAndStatistics

Grade Distribution Plot Creation

Currently, I’m a graduate teaching assistant for Aerodynamics 1 and Aerospace Structures at the University of Alabama. After grading homework, quizzes, and exams I usually input the data into an Excel file. After a bout of procrastination I created a grade distribution plot for my classes.

I used MATLAB to pull the grades out of an Excel file, count the number of occurrences for each grade, and then plot the distribution. I created an Excel sheet that creates random grades so as to avoid using any of my students’ information. I already know the possible range of grades so these are hard-coded. I’ll post updates to the code throughout the semester.

Areas of future work:

  • Updating the way Excel files are called. Using the currentgradesheet variable will cause the error the second time it is called because it will use the first file name it contains.
  • Changing possible grades into a user input or created from the range of grades uploaded from Excel.
  • Tracking student data: being able to call a student’s name and seeing their grade history. This might take another function and a lot more time than I want to spend using MATLAB.

I have no problems with you using my code: just be sure to reference me.

Grade Distribution Plot Routine:

Code and Output in .pdf Format