<aside> 💡 Use this template to describe the steps engineers should follow to use MATLAB and Simulink. Create an example project or give students an option to use both with their idea!
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A prospective student looking at this module should be searching for software solutions to facilitate modeling systems or data. This is a broad use case range, but the purposes of modeling for people interested will probably fall in one of three categories:
All three of these cases should find this module useful, and will learn the same basics to begin, but will have different suggested skill demos or further studying prompts.
What the previous distinctions do help with is figuring out the right level of abstraction for you.
Abstraction - in the context of software modeling - refers to the degree of detail lost compared to the actual system/dataset of the software version being designed. Abstraction is what lets an engineer simulating a car not have to worry about the materials lining the seats in gas mileage tests. It affects nothing, and does not have to be considered when recreating a more abstract copy of the car to analyze.
For a person making visuals or communication media, abstraction can be high - the minimum level of detail required to get a point across can mean abstracting almost all the context of a problem away. A balance must be struck between omitting so much detail that a visual becomes meaningless/baseless, and crowding media with too much information to confuse a reader. What details to omit depend on context, but this will usually mean reducing the size or scope of datasets being processed.
Preliminary demonstrations have much less freedom of abstraction than communication material. This could mean working with smaller sample sets than real world data, or ignoring changing conditions in a system, or assuming perfect geometries of objects. But, the modeling happening here has to faithfully reflect the subject matter, since the output of the project will be expected to match the demo to some degree.
Application-oriented modeling has flipped priorities from communication material - abstraction is discouraged much of the time since models being used for real-world work must account for as many variables as possible for the sake of public safety and technical rigor. The level of abstraction in real-world application will be more constrained by the modeler’s ability to account for variables than anything else.