Feedback from practice tutorial

[moorepants]

• The repetitive exercises get old quick (Jason's dumb idea...)
• It would be nice to have more exploratory exercises.
• Add in passive joint stiffnesses and damping so that the model doesn't flop around.
• Maybe make some more cylinders so that the viz looks more human.
• Only do the two link pendulum instead of three.
• If time at end, let everyone try to create the one link pendulum on their own.
• Give more time for Python intro at MASB.
• No need to split kinematics notebook between Obinna and Jason, Obinna will do the whole thing next time.
• Kinematics notebook took 40 minutes instead of 25.
• We finished in 3 hours but by skipping all the repetive exercises.
• Writing the controller function at the end was a good exercise that wasn't repetitive.
• Add more time for the Python intro for MASB (an maybe less time for PyCon).
• May need a simpler problem for PyCon if the audience is varied.
• Feel free to jump in further and faster for MASB instead of going over the basics in dynamics.
• Make initial values in the simulation realistic values (make knee bend correct way, etc).
• Explain about objects early on so people know that captial letter functions create objects that have methods and attributes.
• We should ask at the beginning what people know: dynamics, programming, etc to get a feel about what we can skip and what we can't.

Possible better exercises:

• Play around with simulation parameters (constants, initial conditions) to get different simulations.
• Explore different controllers: reduced K matrix, play with Q and R weightings.
• Create a nose for the person in the visualization.

[chrisdembia]

Additional feedback:

• Maybe the python intro could explain that ** is an exponent.
• I actually liked the exercises. After the first notebook I didn't do them anymore. I was scared of making a typos (hehe, I just made one). Even if the users don't do them, it'll give them pause and make them think about what they would do if they were to do the exercise?
• I really liked the mini figures placed throughout.
• In general, I thought the content was really good. Seems like a lot to cover. I could see this as a good resource in the future for people who want to learn how to use pydy.

[chrisdembia]

In the controls notebook, I don't understand this sentence:

"Remember that the right hand side function we generated earlier can take a function for the specified values."

[moorepants]

Closing this. We incorporated some of these changes in the tutorial. Leaving the rest mostly as is for PYCON.