Mininet can be found together with Floodlight's open-source controller. For academic simulations, it is better to use Minute and Pox as these can be easily installed and configured by the students on their laptops. It does not require a lot of resources but has a lot of flexibility. Also, each node in the minnet is a process and various applications can be run on them. At the same time, it is strong enough to model
Some complex topologies. After all, if Python is your cup of tea, both Minet and Pox extend with Python.