For loops in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

For loops

📖 Scenario: You work in a small store and want to calculate the total price of items bought by a customer. Each item has a price, and you want to add them all up.

🎯 Goal: Build a MATLAB program that uses a for loop to add up the prices of items in a list and print the total cost.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a vector called prices with the exact values: 10, 20, 15, 5, 30

Create a variable called total and set it to 0

Use a for loop with the variable i to iterate over the elements of prices

Add each price to total inside the loop

Print the final value of total using disp

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Calculating totals is common in stores, restaurants, and anywhere money is counted.

💼 Career

Understanding loops and summing values is a basic skill for data analysis, finance, and programming jobs.

1

Create the prices vector

Create a vector called prices with these exact values: 10, 20, 15, 5, 30

MATLAB

% Create the prices vector with the given values
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a vector in MATLAB.

2

Initialize the total variable

Create a variable called total and set it to 0

MATLAB

prices = [10, 20, 15, 5, 30];
% Create a variable total and set it to 0
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use = to assign the value 0 to the variable total.

3

Use a for loop to sum prices

Use a for loop with the variable i to iterate over the elements of prices. Inside the loop, add prices(i) to total

MATLAB

prices = [10, 20, 15, 5, 30];
total = 0;
% Use a for loop to add each price to total
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use length(prices) to get the number of elements in the vector.

4

Display the total price

Use disp(total) to print the final value of total

MATLAB

prices = [10, 20, 15, 5, 30];
total = 0;
for i = 1:length(prices)
    total = total + prices(i);
end
% Display the total price
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use disp to show the value stored in total.