As an science & engineering undergrad, I was taught some basic Mathematica usage in 2 subjects (Intro. Physics). The sentiment amongst engineering teachers was

As an science & engineering undergrad, I was taught some basic Mathematica usage in 2 subjects (Intro. Physics). The sentiment amongst engineering teachers was that ‘reliance on computer tools is dangerous’, since if you didn’t grasp the fundamentals, you couldn’t properly verify the answers produced. I found this to be one of the largest disappointments while earning my degree: this sentiment is holding people back from embracing the future and I mostly think that teachers just didn’t want to learn programming. As a result, engineers were phobic of doing any coding to solve problems (in my experience working in groups) and instead relied on primitive pen & paper or excel solutions, both of which are more time consuming to scale, re-use or even to verify! If you use Mathematica as a literate programming tool, like a Jupyter notebook, a solution is more readable and verifiable than hand-notes or excel. I had to mostly learn it on my own, and have built up a large library of tools to tackle engineering problems. As a result I can save time on forgetting/re-learning how to do things, as I have a searchable database of solutions at my fingertips. I check and test each of my ‘scripts’ against textbook answers, so I know I can trust them. TL;DR: Teachers, please encourage computer usage for problem solving, but make students understand they need to grasp the fundamentals first!