What’s this class about?

Future engineering classes will ask for a variety of technical skills from you and expect proficiency. This includes shell commands, GitHub, saving files and finding them, or accessing special powerful software. It’s beneficial to be already proficient with these tools so that you are ready to learn the underlying material, and it will save you time in the long run.

E 115 is a computing skills class, where we learn a variety of technologies that get used across engineering. I can’t predict every tool you’ll use (I can’t predict every class you’ll take!). But by interviewing various professors across the engineering disciplines, I have a good sense of what gets commonly used. Tools and popularity also change over time, and sometimes we lag a little bit in terms of the latest and greatest improvements, but the base technologies don’t change that fast. We also want to demystify technology for you, plus – even if you’re not a computer science major – you’ll almost certainly have to work with software engineers in the future. Or you’ll have to talk to tech support! Having a common language will help you.

As a skills class, our overarching goal is to get you familiar with the technologies, and do exercises and labs to simply get familiarity with the items. We don’t expect perfection (it’s a pass/fail class for 1 credit), but we want to see a willingness to try a variety of softwares. We’re happy to troubleshoot and teach you how to troubleshoot.

Due to the limited time we have, we won’t be able to cover all the tools in the same level of detail a full-scale class might. Where possible, we will try to point you towards resources for digging further into a tool or topic, but if something particularly strikes your fancy, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and ask for pointers!

To make the most of the class, you should go through any textbook exercises on your own. We’ll show you what’s possible and cover some of the basics in detail, but we can’t teach you everything in the time we have.

Class structure

The class is (roughly) split up into the topics of file systems/Unix, Excel, GitHub, HTML, and networking. The topics are largely independent, and this class is not strongly cumulative. However, as the semester goes on we will presume that you are familiar with the content from the earlier weeks. 

We are trying to cover a lot of ground over the course of just 8 weeks, so the reading and lecture videos can be fairly dense. To get you mechanical practice, we have labs with strict instructions. You’ll follow along to get familiarity. We also have a variety of small exercises that appear in the textbook chapters that are usually more open-ended to get you practice on your own time and at your own pace. The labs are strict and follow specific instructions so that you can just get mechanical practice, which will free your brain up later for higher-level tasks when you have to apply these tools in future classes.

Each week, we host office hours to answer your questions and help you with labs. You can also send us questions via our group email or a discussion board. While there is a main instructor for this class, E 115 has up to 800 students in a section, so using the group email ensures that we can provide timely, high quality responses!