Engineering Models I

Last updated: 08/27/2014

Author Information

Dr. Kathleen Ossman
Dr. Gregory Bucks
University of Cincinnati

Course Details

Description

Engineering Models I is a first-year undergraduate course that has also been taught as a dual-enrollment engineering program to hundreds of high school students.

This is the first in a unique sequence of interdisciplinary courses designed to develop good problem solving techniques and to illustrate how engineers use mathematics to solve a variety of practical and often complex problems. The course will closely track and directly apply fundamental theory from algebra, trigonometry, and calculus to relevant engineering applications chosen from a variety of disciplines.  MATLAB® will be introduced and progressively developed as a programming tool to enable students to explore engineering concepts, to investigate solutions to problems too complex for hand solutions, and to develop an appreciation of the power and limitations of computer tools.  Special attention will be given to graphical visualization of concepts and to numerical approximation techniques and the errors associated with approximations.  The course includes a two-week team project.

Prerequisites

Course Contents

Pre-Lecture Videos

A series of videos for the majority of the course topics listed below are available.

Topic 1: Introduction to Course and MATLAB

Topic 2: One Dimensional Arrays and Graphing

Topic 3: Graphing and Curve Fitting

Topic 4: Graphing and Interpolation

Topic 5: Input Statements and Good Programming Practices

Topic 6: Conditional Statements

Topic 7: Loops

Topic 8: Nested Loops and Break

Topic 9: Debugging

Topic 10: Arrays

Topic 11: Array Operations and Useful Functions

Topic 12: Array Applications

Project

Team Project: Grand Challenges

As a team download UN datasets and generate user-friendly script file(s) for processing the data. The script file(s) must cover 7 out of the 9 lecture topics from class.

Textbooks

MATLAB: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving, 3rd edition, Stormy Attaway, Elsevier, 2013 Ŧ

Ŧ Supplemental Material

Resources

Cody:  A program developed by MathWorks that allows students to progressively develop MATLAB® programming skills and earn badges in the process