My freshmen spring semester of college (COVID semester!), I took a MATLAB course where we covered many of the practicalities of using this software as well as some basic CS ideas. I really appreciated how my program taught us to use this software right away and continued to heavily rely on it through senior year because it allowed us to move beyond problems where we limited by a hand and calculator approach. Instead, we were able to solve more interesting problems, such as those requiring numerical approaches or those with a broad domain where a surface plot is more meaningful than the solution to one particular set of parameters. For our final project in this class we were to write a program based on any technical problem (within certain parameters). During this same semester, I was also taking a differential equations course where we were learning about solving systems of differential equations, specifically ones that were linear and homogenous. So, I created a program to solve these systems as my project. There are programs you can easily find online to give you eigenvalues/vectors for these systems, but not many that would give you the “complete” solution as I elaborate on in my report and presentation.