The computer has become one of the most widely used tools in the modern world, and has had a profound impact on how engineering and science are practised today. Engineering students are required to familiarise themselves with both the hardware and software environments in a modern computing system, and how to apply the fundamentals of computing to solve various engineering problems. At Griffith University, a computing course was offered to more than 350 first-year engineering students from Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering since 2009. For the last 5 years, most students often find computing and programming difficult because they have limited mathematical and physics backgrounds to understand the problems. The most challenging task for students was to formulate engineering problems and then find an algorithm to solve them. On the other hand, the most challenge task for lecturers is to motivate the students to learn and to provide them an effective learning environment.