Add statement of need

Author: agoscinski

paper.md

@@ -53,6 +53,12 @@ The package facilitates the creation of interactive exercises and demonstrations
 Students are asked to provide pedagogically meaningful contributions in terms of theoretical understanding, coding ability, and analytical skills.
 The library provides the tools to connect custom pre- and post-processing of students' code, which runs seamlessly "behind the scenes", with the ability to test and verify the solution, as well as to convert it into live interactive visualizations driven by Jupyter widgets.
 
+# Statement of Need
+
+This work introduces scicode-widgets, an open-source Python library that transforms Jupyter notebooks into interactive, self-contained learning applications. By hiding boilerplate code behind a clean widget interface, it allows students to focus on core physics concepts, algorithms, and data analysis with instant visual feedback. The widget configuration is fully implemented in Python, enabling flexible creation of diverse teaching exercises—particularly valuable for the research community, given Python’s widespread use in academic, educational, and research settings.
+
+We demonstrate its educational value through a ridge regression exercise that combines interactive code input, real-time controls, and automated visual feedback supported by a color-coded cue system. Used in one undergraduate course at EPFL (MSE-305), the tool has already supported nearly 100 students and received highly positive feedback.
+
 # Introduction
 
 Jupyter notebooks [@jupyter] have been used extensively for the creation