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Problem-solving skills are essential to practicing engineers. Students need to develop, early in their program of studies, the personal attributes, the basic technical knowledge, information literacy, communication skills, team skills, critical and analytical skills, and reflective skills they will rely on as engineering problem solvers. This course prepares students to address the problems that they will encounter in subsequent courses and throughout their career.

The course covers the fundamental principles of engineering problem solving. It emphasises the development of skills in problem solving, critical and analytical thinking, reflective thinking, data analysis, information literacy, communication, time and resource management, and teamwork. It introduces students to the problem solving cycle and to a number of analytical tools and approaches for solving problems. Completion of a team-based project allows students to demonstrate and reinforce the skills and knowledge acquired during the course.

Upon completion of this course, students will have:

1. Explained the nature of engineering problems and characterised them on the basis of their complexity, time constraints, ambiguity, open-endedness, the quality of their definition, analysis and their acceptable solution space;
2. Used a computer spreadsheet and written computer scripts for analysing, summarising and graphical representation of numerical and categorical data;
3. Carried out hypothesis testing and determined confidence intervals;
4. Discussed the errors that can result from interpolation, extrapolation or regression and performed a sensitivity analysis on the proposed solution(s) to a given problem;
5. Demonstrated critiquing skills, reflective writing skills, information literacy skills and communication skills;
6. Produced and interpreted graphical representations such as flow-charts, engineering schematics and flow diagrams;
7. Explained the roles of brainstorming, conceptual design, proof-of-concept, systems thinking, analogy, reverse engineering, modelling and simulation trial and error, and project management within the problem-solving cycle;
8. Acquired the basic skills needed to work effectively within a problem-solving team and produced problem solving interim and final reports in a professional manner with appropriate referencing.