History of this course

This course was written by Prof. Lorena A. Barba (with assistance from her talented doctoral students) in Spring 2014. After the first run, we created in 2015 an online version on a self-hosted Open edX platform that Prof. Barba set up for her MOOC, "Practical Numerical Methods with Python."

The online course was offered freely to anyone in the world who wanted to follow along and learn with us. Users registered in our Open edX platform could enroll in this course, access all materials, and complete the student assignments—all free of charge.

In Fall 2017, we reinstalled the Open edX software to a later version, and reset the courses: registered users retained their accounts, but were not enrolled in the reset courses. At the time, we had more than 800 people registered in the online version of AeroPython

In May 2025, as the Open edX site was taken down, the course had 2110 enrolled. This means in total we reached about 3,000 students from around the world.

We decided to take down the Open edX site, as we could no longer afford the ongoing cloud costs in AWS, plus we were no longer using the online courses in support of the on-campus courses. It was a long run, as the platform stayed online for just over a decade!

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You can cite this course as follows:

• Barba, L.A. and Mesnard, O., 2019. Aero Python: classical aerodynamics of potential flow using Python. Journal of Open Source Education, 2(16), p.45. https://doi.org/10.21105/jose.00045