Class is well organized and labs are successful tools to challenge students and learn the material. I appreciated the specificity of this course to geography, particularly the real-life examples in labs and connections to previous GIS knowledge.

Professor Gao is a genuinely compassionate teacher. For some similar 'esoteric' courses in the past I've had professors get annoyed by more fundamental questions/when students are struggling to grasp a concept, but Professor Gao seriously valued every question I heard asked and gave encouraging and comprehensive answers.

Song is very knowledgeable and talented, with strong geospatial industry experience. I enjoyed his lectures a lot. It is not easy to get A in his class as it requires programming and heavy labs. You need to make great efforts and practice more to achieve the best grade.

This class is absolutely awful if you do not have prior CS experience. Having taken GEOG 377, I thought I would be prepared and I was dead wrong. The labs are astoundingly difficult (and I'm not dumb by any means, I literally had a 4.0, which this class ruined). Song is a terrible lecturer and I learned absolutely nothing in class.

This was a good class; I enjoyed it and felt like I learned a lot. I was thankful that the course was taught using Python3 and Jupyter Notebooks. these are great tools to use for spatial analysis and this course improved my abilities to use them for geospatial analysis, particularly Pandas and GeoPandas.

This was one of the most challenging classes I have taken but I feel more confident in my code writing and more prepared for my future career now because of it.

I found this course extremely challenging because I did not have any prior coding experience. However, the professor and TA were always available to help with materials I was struggling with; they went above and beyond to help students learn the material.

I think this class would be better if we had more labs or homeworkmore chances to actually write Python codeand fewer lectures.

Professor Gao is really cool. I love his instruction mode. We have a lot of examples on class to help understand the programming knowledge and how it relates to GIS fi eld. I learned a lot in this class. The TA also works well with Prof Gao with effective response of emails and the ability to solve problems. I'm very happy in this class.

This course attempts to do double-duty in both teaching Geocomputing as well as providing intro to Python programming. It could be more accomplished if the course could have a programming intro as a prerequisite and maintain a focus on geocomputing/GIS topics, the area where both the professor and TAs have the greatest expertise to offer in depth.

Prof. Gao is nice, & good to connect with if you want to work in his lab. If you want a fairly easy A, take this class. But if you want to learn geospatial coding, don't take his class. Code is taught off slides and uses outdated, non-open-source methods. I promise you will learn Python mapping in a much easier, deeper way by taking CS220 & CS320.

He is very understanding and cares about students

If you want to learn GIS/geospatial big data theories and techniques, this is the course you don't want to miss! Lectures and labs are very useful and Song is a very nice teacher!

I haven't had an experience like that in any other of my courses and thought it was really helpful to see how applicable this learning is as well as making that connection between life as a student and life after. This has been a fantastic course experience I'd recommend for anyone interested both in GIS and/or data science as a whole.

This was my first class with Song and it was an absolute pleasure! His passion and enthusiasm for Geography is hard hard to match. I was really impressed by the professional Data Scientists that he brought in to give presentations during the course - and was amazed when they commented on how well the skills and tools we learned and used in real.

The course is well organized, the final project is a great way to allow students to test their newly learned skills, and Song is a fantastic professor. I loved this course!

Everything with this course is excellent. Professor and TA are the most responsible instructors I have ever met in this campus. They are willing to take time to teach me useful knowledge. Also, they provided me a lot of academic materials that are useful for my future study. I am about to graduate, otherwise I would take another course with them.

I felt that the class had an appropriate mix of examining the more technical aspects of geocomputing and exploring many real-world applications involving geospatial data and programming.

The lab portion of this class was extremely hard especially in the beginning. More examples are definitely needed. I learned a lot in this class though, would recommend.

This course was uniquely designed to effectively prepare students to start tackling problems in spatial statistics and basic machine learning and I think it worked well for those of us who have limited/no experience in spatial analyses or R. The emphasis in the theory in the lecture and using the labs to learn R were helpful and efficient.

This class was probably one of the toughest for me to understand, but Song's enthusiasm for the material kept me going. His lectures go very deep into the material which was helpful for going back to understand it better. His knowledge of every single formula/ everything in his slides is impressive.

His presentations rocked. Very concise and to the point. In addition, they were very relevant to labs and core concepts behind the coding language.

Professor Song is very knowledgeable about his field. His English is not perfect, but it is very good. His lectures are usually pretty clear. He relies heavily on projects and only a quarter of his course grades on a 'quiz/exam'. What he teaches is relevant and helpful.

very nice professor, patient and talented

I learned a lot in this class and will be that much better for it when I get out on the job.

Prof. Gao's class is super cool and utilizes latest technology and advanced methods with R in practice for geospatial data science. I have learned a lot from him!

Prof. Gao demonstrated how to solve geocomputing problems with Python programming. It is practical and very helpful for my individual studies. Ready to learn much cool stuff!

We learn Python programming with geospatial computation examples in his class. It is not easy for a beginner, but he takes great efforts to make the lecture slides are friendly to us and set appropriate discussion sections to help us have a better understanding of the content. His lectures are not boring at all but are helpful for our learning.