It may not be as popular as Angry Birds, but the Corrosion iPhone app developed by Jason Tam (MSE 1T2 + PEY) is finding a grateful audience among professional engineers and engineering students. Tam created the app last year when Professor Steven Thorpe asked his MSE 315 Environmental Degradation of Materials students whether anyone would be interested in developing an app that provided corrosion terminologies, formulae and benchmarking data.

Thorpe had originally hoped to find an existing app that students could use in the course, which primarily deals with electrochemical and corrosion behaviour of engineering materials in various applications. He could only find one less than ideal app in the iTunes store that didn’t even spell ‘corrosion’ correctly. “So I thought to myself, why not bring the course content into smartphones and engage students in a medium they fully comprehend?”Although Tam had no background in application development, he taught himself to use Objective C — the programming language for Apple applications — and completed a working draft of the program in only four months, just before he had to fly out to Nunavut for his year-long Professional Experience Year (PEY) term at Agnico-Eagle Mines Limited. He completed the app during his time off and on monthly 12-hour trips back home to Ontario.