Context when teaching Numerical Methods

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As a director of the [Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling](http://ngcm.soton.ac.uk/) I spend plenty of time thinking about, working with, and particularly teaching Numerical Methods. The [general intro course](https://github.com/IanHawke/NumericalMethods) I give is Maths focussed, has around 100 participants, has about 50 contact hours over 12 weeks, and gets a range of interested students from Maths, Physics and Engineering.

The past two weeks I’ve been teaching Numerical Methods for the Centre for Doctoral Training in New and Sustainable Photovoltaics. With around a dozen participants, many of whom had minimal theory or coding background, and only 10 hours available, some changes in the teaching were required. Most of these followed Software Carpentry approaches: live coding, Jupyter notebooks, sticky notes, and a set of “authentic” examples to train underpinning principles.

Ian Hawke on The Carpentries

Context when teaching Numerical Methods