When creating Matlab GUI elements, you can mix value pairs with structures in the list of input arguments, e.g.

uicontrol('tag','click',struct('position',[0 0 100 20]),'style','push')

Suppose you are creating a function that pre-processes the gui-creation call, and you want to convert the mix of both into a single cell array. That is what this assignment is about.

You are creating a function that converts a cell array that may contain structures into a cell array, with the newly added cells in the place of the structures.