Undergraduate students at the University of Technology Sydney undertake a year-long capstone project in which they apply the skills and knowledge acquired in their coursework to a practical project. It is an opportunity for students to demonstrate that they can meet the levels of performance expected of a professional engineer. Ideas for the capstone projects can be suggested by academic supervisors, industry, or the students themselves.

MATLAB can be a highly effective tool for training my students in the geotechnical engineering discipline because it makes the study of complex concepts more interesting. Each semester, I organize a number of intensive training sessions to familiarise capstone students with the main features of MATLAB such as programming, graphics, optimisation tools, and graphical user interface.

Accordingly, capstone students can quickly generate results then plot or animate their results via an interactive interface, without being inundated with low-level programming details. The project presented is one example of many capstone projects that students have completed using MATLAB to generate useful recommendations for professional and practising civil engineers.