Learner Reviews & Feedback for Spacecraft Dynamics Capstone: Mars Mission by University of Colorado Boulder

The good: - Amazing content. Great presentation. I think Professor Schaub is a good lecturer and presents the information well. The bad: There is no faculty (professor or TA) support. There are some discussions in the forums, but not a whole lot of direction. Also, with the course setup this way, peer review becomes very difficult, because there is no guarantee that there are enough peers to review (and be reviewed). There are also many typos in the quizzes so it's difficult to know if an answer is truly wrong. Finally, the simulation questions can be infuriating because the same codebase can work for one but not the other, and with no support, it's difficult to determine the issue. Still, the content is great and you learn a lot.

I love how this was laid out, when I got to the final full mission simulation all of the pieces just fell into place. The checks along the way give you the confidence that all of the pieces are working correctly, so the classic issue of trying to put all of your functions together and having something unknown not work is almost eliminated. This means no spending hours trying to find that stray sign that is causing the whole simulation to collapse!

This course was really great! I could complete the previous three courses in 6 weeks, but this course took from me 3 weeks. I have faced some issues, however, I could overcome and succeed at the end and this is the most important part. I am really grateful for Coursera and professor Hanspeter Schaub for this opportunity. This great professor will be absolutely missed!.

Great capstone that covers almost all of the desired knowledge one would need from the first to last chapter! Definitely enjoyed this project. The project is also well guided, although one may need to look at the forums now and then for hints and tips on nitty gritties like numerical precision issues etc. Thank you Professor HP Schaub and team.

Great tool for making sure I am on the right track each step of the project. It's nice to be able to submit a project with no uncertainty regarding the accuracy of my results. The 5 submissions per 8 hours feels a bit pointless though. They are all numerical submissions, so you can't power through by guessing and checking like the homeworks.

Only improvement would be to increase feedback on the programming assignments and fix the few typos on the tolerance of your answer. Specifically Task 4 Part 2, I found my answer to 4 decimals was not accepted, but to 7 decimals it was.

Otherwise, great course! I learned a lot and hope it will help me move into the space industry soon!

This course is fantastic. One thing to be aware of - there is very little moderation of the discussion boards, so us students are kind of on our own if we get stuck - however, I found that the discussion boards were active enough to get by.

Extremely interesting course, it is very encouraging to get every step of the project right. A small critic is the lack of guidance in some of the tasks to develop. There is virtually no support from the course developers or moderators. I would not blame this on Prof. Schaub, who is an amazing teacher, and his lessons were extremely valuable. But I think the purpose of the other 25 moderators of the course is to give a minimum support for the questions people post in the forum, which I didn't see whatsoever in any of the month-old posts.

I exceeded 30 courses in Coursera, and this is the only course that I could not pass. Please put tests or evaluated assignments from colleagues like the rest of the courses. Whenever I send a programming assignment he tells me not sent, please amend these errors.