• 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.