A Student Centred Self Learning System for first year engineering computing

First year students enrolled in civil, mining and environmental engineering at the University of Wollongong are introduced to computing skills in the subject Civl196 - Engineering Computing I. On satisfactory completion of this subject, students should be able to: use the Windows operating system; prepare technical reports, including customising tables and graphs using Microsoft Word; solve numerical problems in engineering and analyse experimental data using Microsoft Excel; write computer code in a high level programming language, eg QuickBasic or Matlab. A Student Centered Self Learning System (SCSLS) has been developed for the subject CIVL196. The SCSLS uses commercially available software training tools for Microsoft Windows95/98, Word97 and Excel97 and extends this by application to engineering problems. Results from a trial survey clearly show that students gain a better understanding of engineering computing using the SCSLS.