Computing in Engineering Education: The Current Scenario

In all branches of engineering, computational work/simulation is currently seen as the third vertex of a triangle, complementing observation and theory. This requirement necessitates an engineering student to know computational concepts as well as a whole new language to express these concepts. These are challenging tasks and students might face difficulties in learning the finer details of the language. It is essential to make computing skill an integral part of engineering education and not treat it as an add on. This paper attempts a review of the current approaches to teaching computation skills to engineering students of core engineering branches. It identifies the need for teaching this skill, the components of this skill and the available choices of programming languages to teach this skill. It suggests the adoption of Python as the preferred language to teach computation by comparing its merits and demerits vis-a-vis the other available choices. It is imperative to do a complete rethinking on how engineering education approaches computation skill and arrive at a holistic and integrated approach.