Changes to Course Content

Students in this section of APSC 380 are almost all from the Wood Products Processing program and do not have the programming prerequisite for this course. Additional time was allocated to teaching programming at the start of the course. However, it has not been possible to teach the students enough about programming in one month to allow them to complete the labs. Most students are therefore having problems completing the lab portion of the course and are unable to complete assignments that require them to write programs.

A meeting was held on October 14 between Simon Ellis (Wood Science), Ed Casas (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Ian Yellowley (Mechanical Engineering) and Tom Maness (Centre for Advanced Wood Processing) to discuss these problems.

The following decisions were made regarding the material which needs to be covered in APSC 380:

• the students should learn to write computer programs
• sensors and actuators can be covered in MECH 463
• power electronics need not be covered

• an additional 2 or 3 weeks will be spent on programming topics
• the labs will be postponed for 1 or 2 weeks (and/or one of the four labs will be dropped)
• tutorials will be used to introduce new material on programming rather than being used for review