2.

3 ENG 2139 – INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION AND

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Background
The course introduces all engineering students to fundamentals of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) regardless of the discipline of engineering they wish to
pursue.
Rationale
Students who have entered the school of engineering, intending to study various engineering
disciplines being offered in the school, require basic knowledge of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) for application in their fields. This course introduces the basic
concepts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) due to the importance of
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its widespread use in today’s information
age. Engineering students need to be computer-literate; ICT knowledge has become a must-have.
It has now been reviewed to include fundamental concepts of mobile operating systems,
virtualization, cloud computing, non-SQL database management systems as well as concepts of
big data.

Course Aim
The course is meant to introduce all engineering students to the fundamentals of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT).

Course Objectives
Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

i) Understand fundamentals of hardware architecture of microprocessor-based computer

systems
ii) Understand fundamentals of traditional operating systems as well as mobile operating
systems
iii) Understand fundamentals of database management systems
iv) Use word-processing application packages
v) Understand fundamentals of virtualization and cloud computing
vi) Understand and use basic computer programing language, e.g. C++ programming language

Prerequisites
None
Course Content
Introduction to Computer Hardware and Software
Computer Software: introduction to Computer operating system, using the operating system
GUI, installing and using Windows OS family (7, 8 and 10), Introduction to Open Source OSes
(e.g. Linux).
Database Management System
Introduction to SQL Language, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), data
security, data storage, storage systems.

Introduction to C++ Programming.

Introduction to fundamentals of C++ programming language. This introductory material will start
from concepts data types, variables, flow controls constructs to creating functions and
introduction classes and objects.