Taking into consideration the success of our last theoretical course about General Relativity, lectured by professor Carlos Herdeiro, we opted to embark on other course given by a lecturer from the same research group (Gr@v).
Motivated by our colleagues who wanted to learn Python, we asked professor Valério Ribeiro, a researcher at Gr@v, to give some lectures about how to solve physics problems in that programming language.
The course, which was named Computational Physics, took place from the 8th of March until the 7th of June, once a week, during the afternoon.
In the initial sessions, the professor taught the basics of the Python language, which is incredibly useful in Physics. Each lecture had the duration of 1 hour and a half. After an initial presentation of the methods and the algorithms we were going to use, the sessions were spent solving exercises on personal computers.
The initial attendance exceeded our expectations, registering a surprising number of 33 students, from most of the courses lectured in the Department and even some alumni. These students were allocated in all years of studies, from the 1st year to the 5th year.
Even though the number of students decreased with the number of lectures (as expected), a reasonable number of students stayed, which made the lecturer – student relation more informal.
In the end of the course a certificate (with a template given by EPS) was gave to the students. Each one had the handwritten signatures of the president of our section and the lecturer, Valério Ribeiro, to whom we are thankful for sharing his knowledge with the students.
The feedback of our courses is positive and we intend on continuing on doing them next year.
