Mathematical models allow the designer to optimise and predict, with the necessary mathematical and computational skills being a core part of most engineering disciplines. To succeed, students must rebuild and refine their knowledge from introductory programming, numerical methods plus also discipline specific courses.

CoCalc offer a “Copy to my project” button for students to import the notebook into their own workspace.

To scaffold the three-fold development in programming, numerical methods and discipline knowledge, we developed Jupyter notebooks in which problem statements are accompanied by code cells with some parts of the code redacted, offering hints at how to approach the problems. Within each tutorial set, progressively less help is offered as confidence and competence is gained. To ease maintenance, both the problem and solution notebooks are generated out of the same annotated precursor notebooks. Beyond the educational advantages, marking assignments based on the templates was faster and the Jupyter-generated PDFs were easily marked within Moodle’s PDF grading tools.