I think lots of us have identified the particular seminar involved. What’s a little bit concerning is that the same people have taught some version of the same seminar to freshmen for several years. There can’t be that many freshmen coming into college familiar with MATLAB. So maybe the OP’s daughter is really having a unique kind of problem here. It’s not likely a matter of she has never coded before and everyone else has, or of the course “really” being a CS course, or of women having more trouble coding. (As the OP said, the course description pretty clearly identifies it as a science course that teaches students how to collect data and to use MATLAB to analyze it.) The other thing that’s upsetting is that if the OP’s daughter is having trouble with MATLAB in this course, she may have similar trouble with an awful lot of scientific analysis, if that’s what interests her.
This is more sophisticated than high school, but still pretty basic science technique that she should want to learn, and that she should be able to learn in a course that has taught these skills to freshmen in the past. I think I understand why people have told her to keep working at it.
She would probably feel a lot better now if she withdrew, but she may also want to give it another major try. She HAS to enlist help from other students, though. There will be many, many other students, in her college, in her EC (whatever it is), hanging around in the library who could help her with this. If she begins to get a handle on it, she will be able to get more effective help from the TAs and professors.