Genome Assembly Programming Challenge

The topic is very interesting but it is very rushed and it is very challenging to pass the test

May be the course would have given more hints. But a learned a lot from the projects.

Felt a little bit adrift from the general flow of topics in the other courses. Of course this called a challenge for a reason, but it's funny that you can pass this course doing barely anything actually related to genome assembly as there are other problems for each week as well.

A little bit difficult

This course takes considerably more time than the previous ones per week. There isn't a lot of teaching content because it's supposed to be simulating a real-life project. I personally am not interested in bioinfometrics and string assembly, so I don't feel very motivated.I am happy that I have finished this course and I have learned a lot. I also honed my C++ skills through the many programming assignments; this is one of the reasons I decided to take this over other specializations. The main reason for the 3 stars is that I could have spent the same amount time to learn more about algorithms, instead of thinking about problems I am not particularly interested. Also, there won't be help from the teachers, but the forum community is great.

Most challenging course I've taken on Coursera so far, so be prepared. However, I'm definitely a far better programmer due to it!

Nice exercises were difficult and interesting. You can learn a lot of in this course not only to solve bioinformatic problems

I would like to say thank you to all who have created this course and specialization! Good material, excellent lecturers!

Not bad, but you had better attend Bioinformatics Specialization so you could understand what tutors lecture.

There were countless errors in the descriptions of the programming problems, not just "ambiguities" or "open ended problem definitions" but quantitatively incorrect specific statements (length of inputs, structure of inputs, etc). Many of these issues have been pointed out in the forums, but remain uncorrected as of June 2018.

I did not enjoy this course. I did not like the following things:1) It was advertizing a different course (Bioinformatics or something like that) too hard for my taste.2) The problem statements were often incorrect. In particular what is related to the size of inputs. I have wasted too much time because of these issues. For example, the problem statement says that there will be 400 lines of input. After wasting an hour and a half trying to find a cause of a segmentation error I am reading on the forum a message THAT IS ONE YEAR OLD saying that there are in fact 1618 lines of input.3) The final problem (genome assembler) has a very tight memory limit if you consider the size of the input. Solving it within the memory limit would require special skills that are not covered by the material in this course. Or maybe I (and other people on the forum) are just not smart enough.4) There are almost no lectures. All you have to work with seems to be a 60-page extract from a book.

Greate course