Simulation is an essential tool in any field related to engineering techniques, whether it is used lor teaching purposes or in research and development. When teaching technical subjects, lab works play an important role, as im portant as exercise sessions in helping students assimilate theory. The recent introduction of simulation tools has created a new way to work, halfway be tween exercise sessions and lab works. This is particularly the case for digital signal processing, for which the use of the MATLAB® language, or its clones, lias become inevitable. Easy to learn and to use. it makes it possible to quickly illustrate a concept after introducing it in a course.

As for research and development, obtaining and displaying results often means using simulation programs based on a precise "experimental protocol', as it would be done for actual experiments in chemistry or physics.

These characteristics have led us. in a first step, to try to build a set of exer cises with solutions relying for the most part on simulation: we then attempted to design an introductory eourse| mostly based on such exercises. Although this solution cannot replace the traditional combination of lectures and lab works, we do wonder if it isu t just as effective when associated with exercise sessions and a few lectures. There is of course no end in sight to the debate on educa tional methods, and the amount of experiments being conducted in universities and engineering schools shows the tremendous diversity of ideas in the matter.