Emerging computational tools: Impact on engineering education and computer science learning

Computational tools have become an almost permanent element and one that must be present in novel schemes of interactive learning, practically for every educational topic in engineering education. A pretty natural environment for the application of such emerging technologies is that of scholar courses immersed in computer sciences learning, either in technical, superior or postgraduate teaching. Of particular interest are the teaching-learning processes of such topics as artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, neural networks, and associative memories. This interest arises from the magnitude of enrichment gleaned when the kind of emerging computational tools mentioned above are applied to these processes. The current paper focuses on describing and analyzing the positive impacts achieved in the teacher-student interactions through the application and everyday usage of a set of emerging computational tools that the authors have previously and currently employed in postgraduate computer sciences courses. Notice, however, that the results presented here are applicable-in a straightforward manner-to engineering education in general.