Modeling, Simulation and Military Gaming

This course is generally straightforward. In the first part, you’ll complete a series of forum-style reflections; in the second part, you’ll work on a group project modeling a battle scenario. While the usual group-project headaches apply, the assignment is simple enough that you could tackle it solo if needed. The only real snag is NetLogo. It’s easy to pick up but hampered by spotty documentation and idiosyncratic syntax, which can be frustrating at times.

Overall I think it's very possible to take this with another course, and it would probably pair well with something hard as long as you don't get a bad group.

I thought this was a pretty good class! If you're interested in military simulations, this will be a home run for you. I personally was a bit more interested in the stats and programming aspect of simulation. It's present, but it's a bit more focused on the international affairs/military aspect, as well as simulation design. That was certainly interesting in its own way, but just a heads up. My least favorite part of the course is that it's pretty easy for group members to coast and still get a pretty decent grade, and it is easy to get a group with very different capabilities. But... I suppose that is every class with a strong group project element. Overall, would recommend, even if you know nothing about war or int'l affairs

Very interesting subject matter and an easy A. The only negative feedback I have for the course is the time it takes to get your grade back for each assignment and pray you don't get Paul grading anything important. Dude deducts 20 points for minor issues and only corrects the grade when you complain to the rest of the TAs and Professor.

Other than those two things I found this class very interesting and relaxing compared to rest of OMSCY. Be warned though, this class has nothing to do with Cybersecurity and everything to do with the class title. You're just simulating a military battle and running different scenarios to find out what would have changed the outcome of the battle.

It's staggering this is considered a masters level course.

As a pro the premise is interesting - both the idea of military gaming, but the mechanism of agent-based modelling which is different to other types of simulation. The instructor, Dr. Borowtiz is enthusiastic and the initial lectures were quite interesting.

That is where the good stuff ends. The staff aren't experienced in scaling up a classroom course and it shows, there isn't an appropriate use of tech to make this course work at scale. That leads to delays in grading etc... and frankly incompetent TA's. When I say incompetent they were marking "how to write a research question" questions incorrectly which was like week 3 of the course.

At the start the workload seems huge.. reading 50-page historical analysis of WW2 battles. Till you realise that those 50-pages are worth less than 1% of your grade, the TA will get it wrong anyway and nonsense will get you 80+%. Effectively the entire course grade is a project (in teams of 5), where you submit a recording of a PowerPoint. Every 2 weeks you basically add a couple of min to that PowerPoint, so after the first proposal it's bloody-hard not to get 90% (tho the TA will always find a reason why you can't have 100%).

The coding is in something called NetLogo which is a crusty old Java app, it's old and not conducive to collaborative coding. So effectively 1 person does all the coding (not that it's much, or that it matters). IMHO like it better managed CS courses there should be a project Repo on a GT GitHub and everybody should have to make contributions, and staff can see the commit history. Change NetLogo to PyLogo or a Python based project so it's at least in Python.

It's not an exaggeration to say that other than meeting my team once a week (where we all proactively wanted to do well) I didn't do more than 2-hours a week on average for the 2nd half of the semester and I got a strong A; I stopped watching the lectures after about week 6 and didn't attend an office hours after week 2.

It's a real shame, this should be an amazing course! I really hope Dr. B fires the TAs, grows the class slowly in scale and re-writes it to make it more modern... good news is she seems to be proactive so maybe this will be a good course in a year or two

This course is perfect for a light semester. You'll have to pick up a programming language but it's really easy for anyone who can code.

The group project was fun even with 2 of the group members did literally nothing.

Before you start to work on the project, I recommend understanding the difference between "battle" and "war". Pick a "battle" to model, don't pick a "war"! A number of groups seem to miss this or they realized it too late.

This class was pretty fun. You are assigned weekly discussion board posts and readings which are really easy for the first portion of the semester then they fall off completely. The whole class is basically a group project with minimal work if you are working great as a team.

The downfall of the course is you spend like 1/3 or so of the course doing discussion board posts and readings and not really doing anything productive for the project. Ended up spending the last 2-4 weeks grinding through the NetLogo code with the group. They don't really expect much and they also give you source code for previous semester group projects.

If you are looking for an easy A and a chill semester, def pick this class. My goal was to coast and this class was great for that. Also there are no exams or quizzes which is a huge plus.

I really liked this class. To concede the points made by many other reviewers, the class is essentially one long group project, and the content is tangential to most majors. But the skills you learn - quickly picking up a new coding language and platform, working with a cross-functional team, integrating computer science with research and presentation skills - are very career relevant. Prof Borowitz is brilliant and engaged. The class is small and she personally responds to student questions. Her research on space weapons (weaponry deployed by and targeting satellites) is interesting and super relevant to current events. Toward the end of the class we had the option to participate in a simulated war game involving satellite weaponry with the prof personally leading small groups and discussion afterwards.

Oof, what can I say about this class. For some background on where I'm coming from, I have a BS in Aerospace Engineering, with 5 years experience in software engineering, and this was my 6th class in OMSCS. I have worked my entire career in the defense industry, with about 2 years of experience in modeling in simulation, so I thought this might be an interesting class to see how it compares to what I've done and to possibly learn more about the field.

Let's start with the positives: It was a pretty easy A.

Now for the negatives: There are honestly too many to list here, so I'll try to do the quick version. First off, the assignments in this class are ridiculous. Basically the entire class is centered around a single group project where we made a simulation using a tool called NetLogo. I'm not even going to get into how awful it was working with NetLogo, because that was its own disaster. There were lectures, but I don't think I watched any past the first week or two since they were not relevant or helpful at all. Basically your experience in this class comes down to your group. I ended up being the strongest programmer in the group, so I did most of the actual coding, and left most of the presentation to the rest of the group. The way the deadlines were set up, we would often have 2 or even 3 weeks of nothing, then just do everything for that deadline in one weekend. Like I said, it's a pretty easy A, but just no real value in my opinion. I have been working on simulations in defense for a couple years, and this literally gave me no value to my career.

Overall, I would not recommend this class to anyone. Seriously. This is the only class I've taken in OMSCS that I regret taking. It was a waste of time and means one less class I get to take in the program that could have actually given me some useful knowledge and skills. The only reason I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 overall is because it was easy and grading was generous. That being said, there are other classes in the program you could take that would be more useful but still have a lighter workload.