High Level Programming Packages In Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering

At the start of the 2003-04 academic year Mathcad and Matlab were chosen for the introductory programming course in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Prior to this change, C programming was taught, which had replaced FORTRAN several years earlier. The primary motivation for introducing these high level programming packages is to allow more time to be spent on setting up and solving engineering problems. Faculty responsible for this introductory course as well as a numerical methods course felt that too much time was being spent on the minutia of programming syntax. Both of these packages can be learned sufficiently quickly to tackle meaningful problems in undergraduate engineering within one semester. Each package has its strengths and a role to play in undergraduate engineering instruction. These strengths will be discussed in the paper.