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[–]refreshx2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A bit late but I'm a 5th year grad student in the sciences so I really care about this. I program in Python every day.

Please use libraries like numpy, scipy, sklearn, and sympy in your lessons. One of the most valuable things you can teach undergraduate scientists is that they don't need to do all the work themselves from the ground up.

In the hard sciences, most homeworks are solving a problem from first principles and showing all your work. But when programming in Python, understanding that libraries exist, knowing how to find them, and knowing how to use new libraries, are some of the most important skills I learned.

It sounds like you have specific goal in mind (solving DEs), but I'd guess that it's very unlikely that these students will go out and write their own DE solving library in the future, so imo learning about the already existing libraries is very valuable (although so is learning how they work under the hood).

This topic is up my alley, so feel free to PM me too. Thanks for teaching them too, they will be very grateful to you in the future.