I have taken programming courses and a genetics course for my degree. This course has been good practice for me, putting my previous knowledge together. Unfortunately, the course includes terminology/concepts a true beginner would need much longer to grasp than the estimated time. Students need to be prepared to participate in discussions and search online if they want a deeper understanding. Code academy is also a necessary part of the process for true beginners.

The course was really amazing, but one point is that it was really really difficult. In my opinion, it did not take into consideration the student completely new to Python. It should've been easier or it should have a lot of hints and ways to support and tell the student what to do if they get stuck.

However, in general, I learnt a lot and for the first time in my life about this area of science.

Thank you very much!

This course is really great and eye-opening! However, this course is for people with computer science/programming background that are new to molecular biology. I struggled a lot trying to understand the programming part since I have plant genetic & breeding background. I recommend to learn and understand programming language first before going to this course. Thumbs up to everyone who survived!

It's not a beginner's level course. You need to know python really well to do this. I had to take 3 courses on python before I could come back here and complete the course. Also their teaching method of leaving the page in the middle of one topic to learn another topic which you need to understand the first topic is a bit distracting and makes you lose your train of thought.

This is billed as a course for beginners, but it leans heavily on one's prior skill in programming. If you're not familiar with Python syntax or you are a coding neophyte, a lot of the concepts will likely go over your head. The biology is fairly cursory and easy to pick up along the way, or simply ignore if you don't have a strong background in molecular biology/genetics.

the course is ok, but there were technical problems, It was very annoying that the graphics on the stepik pages were not displayed. I tried several browsers but it was only possible to open the hidden/not loaded images in another tab window. Another problem was sometimes, that the "run code" in stepik worked find, but some errors were shown for "send"

If you have no experience with programming, I definitely recommend completing the Learn Python course on Codecademy first. I think Biologists will find the concepts introduced later in this course difficult to grasp, and I still don't fully understand them. Nonetheless this course is a good introduction into programming for bioinformatics.

It's a great course for people who know Python or have some sort of a background in coding. However, for starters, it is not only tedious to learn both Python as well as this but is quite challenging and time consuming as well. Please mention Python as a prerequisite for this course-- it would definitely get 5 stars then.

I'd give it a 2.5, but I managed to learn something in the end, even though it was through the other students rather than through the course lecture itself. The professors should really consider renaming the course to be a more accurate representation of the content. We learned more about DNA that coding in this course.

Very interesting course, although not suitable for non-coding Biologists. You will learn about python in parallel to this couse, but the materials given are not enough to comprehend the coding you are required to come up with. You will definately spend more than 4 hours/assignment.

The content is interesting, but the staff does not provide helpful feedbacks, and I really do not like the fact they assume the test case is always right, where it might not be. Quite frustrate when struggling on one question when the code is absolutely right.

Further reference material needs to be added in my opinion. There can be participants from only Computer Science background and there can be students from only biology background. Hence i think reference materials could aid a participant's understanding a lot.

This was a good course for someone with a fair amount of programming background and a biology degree. But it was difficult to follow at times and I could see how one could easily get lost. Definitely feels more of an intermediate course than a beginner one.

Pros: a lot of programming in automated online environment.

Cons: inconsistencies in code like changing parameter order in often used functions, changing structure of some variables (arrays become dicts). This can be unneccesarily misleading.

Disappointing lack of feedback from any course organiser (most recent response seemed to be about two years old). The biological content tailed off to become much more of course in programming for search algorithms

it's NOT a beginner-level course and will definitely take much more than 20 hours. They could have made it easier for beginner cos for people who haven't coded before, its REAL HARD.

otherwise, its fine

Some background knowledge on coding is definitely needed for this course, despite the info saying none is needed. The progress expected is way too fast for an actual beginner with no coding experience.

The course is EXCELLENT. But... It's not for beginners!!! If you don't know anything about programming, python and bioinformatics it's nearly impossible to do without help.

It was really frustrating.

This is not for beginners. You need to know more about python to complete it easily and the time limits of Stepik is not correct. It needs far more time than mentioned.

This course is definitely not for beginners. I was on the verge of giving up throughout the course. But once you get ahold of the concepts, it is very interesting.

The course tries hard to balance programming and biology but the programming can become quite a challenge for people with little to no experience in programming.

Although this course was uniquely interesting and insightful, I did feel at times that the lesson material was insufficient to fully understand a concept.

Although this course is possible for beginners, some of the programming problems were frustrating and a hint would have been appreciated.

Not truly for beginners. If you don't have previous knowledge of Python and algorithms expect to invest a lot more than 4 hours a week

Adorei a dinâmica do curso, porém o prazo de término das atividades é extremamente incoerente com a quantidade de afazeres propostos.