• Semester 1 (Day)
• Semester 1 (External)
• Semester 2 (External)

Synopsis

Computers   and   related technology have become an integral  part  of
engineering,  both   as  a  tool  for analysis and  design  and  as  a
system for embedding  in  an application.  They enable problems to  be
approached  in  many different ways,  for example  a  simple  computer
simulation  can  often  give more insight  than  a  complex  algebraic
solution.

Students   must   of   course   be  made aware  of   the   fundamental
technology   and  terminology   and  be  able  to  make  good  use  of
wordprocessing  and  spreadsheets. More  demanding is the  ability  to
formulate  engineering  problems in  a  way   which  can   be  readily
programmed on desktop machines in well structured understandable code.

Students  will  be given a fundamental understanding and aptitude   in
a   simple structured  programming language and will learn to  express
engineering  problems in  software  terms.   They  will learn the  use
of   iteration   to  simulate  the solution of differential  equations
and  to  display  the results with graphics.  In the   process,   they
will   learn the fundamental "grammar"  of  computing  from arithmetic
assignment   through looping and conditional  control  to   structures
including  subroutines  and  functions.  They will be  introduced   to
background  topics   including  the  history  of  computing  from  and
engineer's   perspective   and  the   relationships  between   various
programming  languages,  such  as  C,   Fortran,  Algol,   Pascal  and
Visual Basic and between operating systems such as MSDOS  and UNIX  as
they are employed in current engineering practice.