G’day, your friendly neibourhood compsys man or whatever here.
Today we’re talking sem 1 of compsys, which is actually the exact same as it is for electrical students but yep.
ElectEng 291 Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering
This is the continuation of good ol ElectEng 101, in this course you kinda actually understand the formulas/circuits you memorised (or at least attempeted to) the previous year. William’s back and this time goes a little easy at first for a few weeks in revision of previous content. Then William digs deeper into theoroms like thevenin, superposition and node voltage analysis and you really start to understand how they work. You’ll also learn all about how to work with circuits in the frequency domain which confused me for a while until it clicked and become simple. Labs in the course are a lot of work but they really do help you understand everything. You’ll walk away from this course tired, but full of knowledge
(and with a love/hate relationship to William).
Compsys 201 Fundamentals of Computer Engineering
So compsys 201 is split into 2 pretty seperate sections, the first half is all about boolean algebra, bits, logic gates and what they can do, I really enjoyed this section as you learn how a few different simple logic gates can do math, and store data and do all kinds of cool logic. The second half you learn about using microcontrollers, specifically one called ATMEGA328 (which is the used in arduinos) and coding them in C, this half was kinda a blur for me, (I’m not sure how honest they want me to be in this but whatever lol) as a lot of lectures were just almost screenshots from the datasheet/documentation where they read out how to use a specific register or peripheral or whatever. The second half is probably my least favourite part of doing Compsys so far, but largely just because I didn’t like the way it was taught, so don’t worry if you think I’m saying microcontrollers are boring, because they’re a lot more fun in the next semester when you actually use them in Compsys 209 and you’ll appreciate all the boring lectures in 201 for teaching you what you need to know.
Heres a meme to keep you engaged
SoftEng 281 Object-Oriented Programming
So this course is the big programming course which a lot of people think is the highlight of sem 1. Here you’ll learn in java all about how to do object oriented programming, that means you’ll be making classes and using design patterns and all kinds of fancy stuff, at first you’ll feel it’s silly, unnessessary and overcomplicates things but by the end of the course you’ll understand how much easier coding can be with the tools and techniques you learnt over the semester. I lost track of how many lecturers we had (it was probably only like 4) but my favourite was the last 2 lecturers we had which were actually teaching at the same time. Partha and Aron are my favourite comedic duo at UoA where they teach data structures and algorithms like linked lists, search algorithms and graphs. With Aron being the enthusiastic fun loving more student like one and Partha being the more straight man “I’m here to teach” experienced one while playing off eachother a lot. (I hope they don’t find this disflattering because I and basically everyone really did love their teaching and laughed a lot).
EngSci 211 Mathematical Modelling 2
I’m kinda skipping on this one cuz everyone else covers it but basically be prepared for pain and stats.
And one more meme for getting to the end
I’m just reusing this one I made last year (you’ll have to use matlab 1 more time in 211 btw)