While loops in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using While Loops in MATLAB

📖 Scenario: You are helping a cashier count the total number of coins collected in a jar. The jar contains coins of different values, but you only want to count coins until the total value reaches or exceeds a certain amount.

🎯 Goal: Build a MATLAB program that uses a while loop to add coin values one by one until the total reaches a target amount.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a vector called coins with the exact values: [1, 5, 10, 25, 1, 10]

Create a variable called target and set it to 30

Use a while loop to add coin values from coins until the total is at least target

Print the final total value after the loop ends

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Counting coins or items until a certain limit is reached is common in cash handling, inventory, and budgeting tasks.

💼 Career

Understanding while loops helps automate repetitive tasks and control program flow in many engineering and data processing jobs.

1

Create the coin values vector

Create a vector called coins with these exact values: [1, 5, 10, 25, 1, 10]

MATLAB

% Create the coins vector
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a vector with the given numbers separated by commas.

2

Set the target total value

Create a variable called target and set it to 30

MATLAB

coins = [1, 5, 10, 25, 1, 10];
% Create the target variable
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the assignment operator = to set target to 30.

3

Use a while loop to sum coin values

Create variables total set to 0 and index set to 1. Then use a while loop with the condition total < target && index <= length(coins) to add coins(index) to total and increase index by 1 inside the loop.

MATLAB

coins = [1, 5, 10, 25, 1, 10];
target = 30;
% Initialize total and index
% Your code here

% Use a while loop to add coins until total reaches target
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to initialize total and index before the loop. Use while with the condition that total is less than target and index is within the vector length.

4

Display the final total value

Use disp to print the value of total after the loop ends.

MATLAB

coins = [1, 5, 10, 25, 1, 10];
target = 30;
total = 0;
index = 1;
while total < target && index <= length(coins)
    total = total + coins(index);
    index = index + 1;
end
% Display the total
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use disp(total) to show the final total value on the screen.