Front cover

The University of Utah´s Department of Computer Science has offered an introductory course on scientific programming, called Engineering Computing, since 1994. Each year, approximately 300 first- and second-year science and engineering majors take the course. They learn how to use a variety of programming techniques to solve the kinds of computational science problems they will encounter in their academic and professional careers. The original impetus for developing Engineering Computing came in 1993 from the dean of the College of Engineering at the time, David Pershing. Dissatisfied with the conventional courses in C and Fortran programming that the engineering students were taking, he wanted to develop a more effective alternative. With the support of a course development grant from the Department of Energy´s Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science (UCES) project, course development began.