Changing Computer Literacy and Its Effect on Engineering Education

For the past six years all new entrants to two first year electronic engineering courses have been questioned on their use and awareness of basic computer literacy. This includes their ownership of personal computers, what they do with them, how they use them to study and their knowledge of different types of software, such as word processing, databases and spreadsheets. The original syllabuses for both courses assumed little pre-knowledge of computer usage. Now this assumption is incorrect and the syllabuses have been rewritten to take into account this change. This is especially significant as one of the courses studied was a studio-based course that did assume a higher level of computer literacy than that initially shown by most students, which is now not true. The paper presents the results of the survey and discusses the changes made to accommodate the increased computer literacy of the students. It also raises questions about how this affects engineering courses in general, and whether online or web-based courses are the correct answer.