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). Please only send the email; there is no need to submit via Canvas.

bois
melowitz
jangregrowicz
gwythes

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. For half of the book, techniques (like linear stability analysis, stochastic simulation, ...) and concepts (like paradoxical regulation, frequency modulation, ...) were separated, the former as technical appendices and the latter in the main chapters. In the second half of the book, by and large these things were integrated together in the notebooks. Do you have a preference on this?
  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. 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 to you?
  5. We are adding an appendix on mathematical preliminaries things such as basic probability, linear stability analysis, numerical methods for ODEs, etc. Do you have and general suggestions for this?

Course organization¶

  1. We did not really have formal recitations, but rather three sets of office hours that were more free form. Would you like formal recitations, or were you fine with the way outside-of-class sessions were set up?
  2. On a related note, if we did do recitations, what topics would you like to see covered in them?

Any other suggestions?¶

  1. All other thoughts and comments appreciated.