Problem X: Feedback on the course and course materials¶

We are always looking to improve the course, so we solicit feedback from students at the end. We are also planning on putting out our Jupyter notebooks for the world to use. We greatly appreciate your thoughtful comments. Please submit the results of this problem as text in the body of an email to the course staff (xxxx@caltech.edu with xxxx substitutions below).

bois
melowitz
mkapasia
kslee
jmarken

Thank you for doing this, and thank you also for a great term!

Notebooks and their structure¶

  1. What would you add/delete/change to the chapter notebooks to make them most useful both for the course itself and as an enduring resource for future research and learning?
  2. Did you like how the techniques (like linear stability analysis, stochastic simulation, ...) and concepts (like paradoxical regulation, frequency modulation, ...) were integrated together in the notebooks, or would you prefer to have these things separated?
  3. Was the biocircuits package useful? Do you have any suggestions for improving it (beyond improving the documentation)?
  4. Did you use the search feature of the course content to find what you were looking for in the notebooks?
  5. Did you like to have collapse-able code cells when the code cells are not central to the main ideas in the notebook?
  6. Do you have any suggestions for notebook organization?

Content¶

  1. Were there additional topics you would like to see included in future editions?
  2. What methods and approaches required more (or less) depth?
  3. How was the balance of conceptual / analytical / computational approaches?
  4. Which homework problems were most valuable?
  5. We are considering restructuring the chapters so that the worked-out details are as chapter appendices, with the chapters themselves skipping the details and most presenting the results. Do have opinions on this?
  6. We are also considering adding appendices on mathematical preliminaries, mathematical methods such as linear stability analysis, and numerical methods for ODEs. Would this be useful? Do you have suggestions for this?

Course organization¶

  1. There were a few recitations held this term (on basic math, nondimensionalization, and linear stability analysis). How helpful did you find those? Should we keep doing these? Would it be helpful to hold those recitations earlier in the term?
  2. On a related note, which additional topics would it have been helpful to have a recitation on (e.g. a recitation on coding, more recitations on basic mathematics, etc.)?

Any other suggestions?¶

  1. All other thoughts and comments appreciated.