How Best You Can Utilize Your Computer to Tackle Engineering Problems

This paper presents an educational experience on how best engineering students can utilize their computers to tackle engineering problems. The study is matured from a long teaching experience of the Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering course required from all first year students majoring either in Computer and Communications Engineering (CCE) or in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the American University of Beirut (AUB). In addition to raising awareness of the engineering topics, the course focuses on the innovative approach of using software tools in considering real-life problem solutions in order to adopt them to new educational technology. This has been achieved by carefully designed experimental sessions where software tools are introduced with an objective of illustrating the technical and analytical computing environment such as Microsoft Office, PSPICE, and MATLAB. These tools are integrated, in this setting, for students to visualize programming environment in solving and documenting engineering problems. In addition the students are introduced to different information research tools to better enhance and support their problem solving skills by using proper referencing.