Tutorial alpha user feedback: Building a model of Parkinson's disease using Neural Mass models

[sbrincat]

General
As presented, I don’t feel like it’s made clear what this tutorial adds to the tutorials. Setting aside the “Getting Started” Wilson-Cowan model, I think this is the first real introduction to neural mass models. I wonder if we should make that, and the transition from the PING tutorial, a bit more explicit? Something along the lines of “In the previous tutorial, we built a model by adding and connecting single neurons. Now we will zoom out and model entire neural populations using neural mass models. [then briefly define/explain neural mass models…]”

• The title of this tutorial is too confusingly similar to the next one. Can we maybe change it to something like “Building a model of the Basal Ganglia using Neural Mass models” (esp. since it’s not clear whether the Parkinsonian BG is even being modeled here)?
• Link to “Example 1” leads back to the same page (auto-link).
• This tutorial ends abruptly with running the simulation. Could maybe we have some plot of the output here, and some wrap up of what was covered?

Cell 2

• “Here we demonstrate a different approach by adding edges one by one”. With the current tutorial order, add_edge!() now appears prior to this in both the Wilson-Cowan and PING tutorials, so maybe we should remove this to avoid confusion?

[agchesebro]

General thought while working through the tutorial fixes for this: do we maybe want a figure illustrating this circuit? It could be from the GUI with the circuit to avoid creating a bunch of new illustration work.

[sbrincat]

Agree that this tutorial feels maybe a bit plain, and could use a circuit figure to illustrate it. I can ask Annabel in our Friday meeting if she might have time to work something up.

[agchesebro]

Overhauling this tutorial over in 478. New version should be ready to go whenever the decision about the illustration is made!