During the first semester, the group went through overviews of many specialized mathematical software packages (Mathematica, GAP, Macaulay2, Sage, Sympy, Polymake, Porta, LRS) and general-purpose computer languages (Perl, C++, Python, Javascript). Students also gave presentations on their own projects. Part of the requirement was writing a wiki explaining some projects and solutions.
During the second semester, the class will have a more traditional lecture / homework / solutions format. We will stick to one language: Python with Sympy, and will have a sequence of increasingly harder AGANT-oriented mini-projects that each student will have to do on their own, and which then will be discussed in class. From time to time we may still have students’ presentation of their own projects, as those get completed.