CS1171 - Computing for Engineers

Fall, 2008 Class Syllabus

Evaluation

Evaluation will be entirely by a final examination.  You may attempt the early exam, and re-do it to improve your grade at the second offering.  If you try both exams, you will be given the better of the two scores.

Course Content

Concepts

The students will be expected to be familiar with the following concepts, either by writing code to solve problems, or by diagramming the behavior of the more complex algorithms.

General Principles:

  • abstraction
  • testing
  • debugging
  • problem solving

Concepts evaluated by coding:

  • data types
  • the use of variables for storing data
  • basic mathematical and logical expressions
  • arrays
  • operations on arrays
  • strings and character arrays
  • structures
  • file input and output
  • conditional statements
  • selection 
  • repetition
  • functions and procedures
  • variable scope
  • plotting 2-D and 3-D data
  • recursion
  • manipulating images

Concepts evaluated graphically

  • sorting data
  • queues and stacks
  • graphs (in the sense of generalized dynamic data structures)
  • search techniques

Language

  Matlab® is an excellent first language for engineers.  It is an interpreted language that provides students immediate feedback from their actions, and postpones many of the gory details of correctness until a program is run.  It is an ideal environment for ordinary engineering computation.  This course is conducted from the Matlab® environment.  'Matlab' is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.  Students who wish to work on their Matlab® assignments on their own computers are required to purchase a Matlab® license. For students not wishing to purchase the license, Georgia Tech provides access to computers equipped with Matlab® licenses through a licensing arrangement with The MathWorks, Inc.

Open Door Policy

The instructor maintains an open door policy.  You are free to visit during the posted office hours or, if you prefer a different time, by appointment.  It is very important to make contact as soon as you feel that you might need to.  Problems, unlike fine wines, don't improve with age.

Grading Policies

There is no curve in this course. The grading breakdown is as follows:

Final 100%

The Pass / Fail score required is 70%.

Email Policy for this Course

You are encouraged to conduct all official email correspondence for this course using your official GT email account. This is to protect your privacy. Email from outside sources such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and other personal accounts should also be avoided - many Spam killers automatically reject mail from these accounts. For a quickest response, put CS1171 in the subject of your e-mail.

What to do in case of problems

If you need help, you should contact the instructor.

Last Modified August 15th, 2008: by David Smith