Participation of undergraduate students in research helps them nurture critical thinking, develop research skills, enhance self-confidence, and clarify their education or career paths. The curriculum is central to integrating teaching and research, and is a primary source for providing undergraduate research experience. This study designed a MATLAB course for undergraduate students in Cartography and Geographic Information Science. This course integrated various models of research-teaching nexus and combined MATLAB with the profession, aiming to benefit students' learning, improve their general understanding and specific skills of research, and teach them how to conduct research. A total of 47 students were enrolled, and 37 of them completed this course. Benefits and costs of the course for students were investigated, and students' perception of the course was evaluated. Students benefited from the course in four aspects: personal gain (setback resilience and independence), understanding of knowledge synthesis (research process and problem solving), skills (literature reading and writing), and professional development (community engagement and ethical conduct). Although time costs and relatively high difficulty were reported to potentially conflict with other activities, the students still had a high degree of satisfaction and acceptance for this course.