In Fall 2013, the Department of Mathematics at Brigham Young University began offering the Applied and Computational Mathematics Emphasis (ACME) in the undergraduate math major. This emphasis enables students to be better prepared to use their math skills in a way that can be applied to real-world problems.The new curriculum consists of eight credits per semester of advanced undergraduate coursework in mathematics, statistics, and computation. Many of the ACME students are double majors in math and in economics.
I have been involved in helping with the development and teaching of the math and computational curriculum in the ACME program from before its inception. I am a Co-PI on the three-year, $599,918 NSF grant (see grants page) that funded the development of the new curriculum used in ACME. In addition, we have incorporated significant portions of the ACME math curriculum into the initial seven-week "boot camp" training for our students in the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory (MCL).
In addition to its innovative approach to providing math training, the ACME program has a significant computational component. All ACME students learn scientific computing using the open source, interpreted programming language of Python. I have been involved in the writing and development of the open source repository of Python labs for ACME that give the students computational training and exercises in advanced scientific computing. In the computational component of the seven-week "boot camp" training of the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory (MCL), we use a mixture of Python labs from the ACME volumes, exercises and chapters from the Sargent and Stachurski website http://quant-econ.net/, as well as labs that I have written that are not part of the ACME curriculum.