Student Center

Running the Demos

• Prerequisites and Expectations for the Tutorial
• A Very Elementary MATLAB Tutorial
• Starting MATLAB
• Running the Demos
• Getting Help
• Creating Variables
• Performing Calculations
• Visualizing Data
• Creating Scripts with MATLAB Editor/Debugger
• Saving Variables and Sessions
• Working with Files, Directories and Paths

You should have already started MATLAB, and have the MATLAB command window open on the Windows desktop. If not, go back to the previous lesson to find out how.

Well, we're trying to get you started with MATLAB here, so why don't we try some demos.

There are actually many different demos, all accessible from a demo window that is popped up when you type, demo, at the command prompt.

You are not really expected to learn the details of using MATLAB through these demos, but rather just to get a good feel for the kinds of things you can use MATLAB for. There are even some games you can play in these demos, and most of the demos have quite visually appealing graphics, so you should enjoy going through these demos. MATLAB is a very practical and powerful tool for solving many different types of problems, and you should appreciate this more after going through some of the demos.

So, to start the MATLAB demos type, demo, at the command prompt and then hit the enter key. The MATLAB demo window should then pop-up and wait for you to choose and run the various demos; the MATLAB demo window looks like this:

Click on image to see enlarged view.

We won't go through all the demos here in this tutorial, but rather get you going by showing you how to start one of them. You can then work through some of the others similarly at your own pace.

To see the different demo categories click on the plus sign (+) next to MATLAB in the Demo tab of the Help Navigator. You should see the folders of Matrices, Numerics, Graphics, etc. Within each of these categories are several individual demos.

The text box on the right side contains a description of the currently selected demo category; For example if you select Gallery as the demo category, the top right text box will contains a brief description of this category (i.e., "Gallery - This virtual Gallery is for displaying...").

You can see the different demos associated with a given category by expanding the folder (click on the plus sign next to the category); so within the Gallery category, there are individual demos named Knot, Quiver, Klein II, etc. If you select an individual demo some information regarding the demo will appear on the right hand frame. And two of the options that you have are to run the demo, and to view the code for the demo.

As an example try the following. Select Gallery within your own open MATLAB demo window. Then, select the demo Slosh and run it. You should get the following window to pop up:

Click on image to see enlarged view.

This demo simply shows you another good example of the kinds of graphical effects you can achieve with MATLAB; some of the other demos are more involved, requiring you to click buttons to navigate through them and make selections.

Take some time now and run some of the other demos to get a feel for the possibilities of MATLAB.

Before moving on, you might also want to run the intro demo. This is another example which will give you a basic introduction to MATLAB and its capabilities. To run the intro, select MATLAB->Matrices->Basic Matrix Operations under the demos section of the Help Navigator, or type, playshow intro, at the command prompt. Another window to pop-up, and you can then click buttons on this window to move through the demo.

Continue on to the next lesson.