This is a course aims at removing some of the mysteries out of using a computer to do meaningful physical calculation. Students will be introduced to a number of basic methods on how to investigate common introductory physics problems using the fast calculator commonly known as computer.

Students will be taught basic computer programming using Java language in Linux or Windows environment.

Result of calculation will be printed to screen for immediate inspection. Large output then can easily be redirected to a file in the hard disk and using a command line visualization program the data in the file may be plotted onto graphic screen and the graph can be saved as an image in various file format.

Students will also be introduce to ways on how to do computation across computer network and how to visualize result of computation from remote machine on local machine.

Learning outcomesOn successful completion of this course, student should be able, at threshold level, to:

• formulate and culculate simple physics problems using computer.
• design a simple interface for interactive physics solver.
  
• develope a java program for solving elementary physics problem.

Generic skill benefitted out of this courseOn participating in lab and practical assignments, student should acquire the following computer related skill;

• hands on familiarity with unix like operating system; console command line mode and X windows GUI mode,
  
• experience with working on client server environment specifically using ssh, and
  
• experience with using java programming language in intergrated development environment (IDE) specifically netBean 5.x.x.