Course Description

This course aims at introducing first-year undergraduate engineering students with basic computer programming. The course assumes no prior knowledge about computer systems and any knowledge of computer programming. Important programming concepts required in most modern programming languages, including program design, data types, conditional and iterative control flows, creating and using subroutines (methods), and arrays, are covered in this course. Java programming language is chosen for introducing these concepts and demonstrations of real source code. The course also touches briefly upon some concepts related to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) including classes, objects, and inheritances. Solving problems using recursive approaches is also introduces in order to expand students’ perspective beyond iterative approaches familiar with most novice programmers.

Despite Java being the sole programming language elaborated in this course, students should be able to apply the concepts learned in this course to any programming languages and use them as foundations in studying more advanced programming concepts in the future.

All materials are presented in English so that international schools can benefit from them. Most examples and problems shown in this course are chosen so that they are more engineering-related than ones in other programming books found in bookstores nowadays.