Hands On Projects For A Freshman Course In Computer Applications In Engineering

All first-year engineering students at Western New England College are required to take a two-credit hour course that deals with computer-aided engineering. This course has two components: computer-aided problem solving and engineering practice. To satisfy the engineering practice portion of the course, all students are expected to present and demonstrate a successful solution to an engineering design problem. The other portion of the course concentrates on developing students' problem-solving skills using engineering computational tools such as MATLAB and MathCAD. In this paper we concentrate on presenting hands-on computer experiments. These are designed to motivate students, enhance problem-solving skills, and introduce students to the latest technology in data acquisition tools as well as data manipulation and processing using MATLAB.