On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Greg Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have copied the lesson on regular expressions (and its history) out of the > 'bc' repo and put it into a new repo, in the new format, at > https://github.com/gvwilson/regex. I've fixed a couple of small glitches in > the lesson template along the way, but more importantly, I've realized that > the regex lesson needs a complete overhaul: > > 1. When we teach regular expressions, we introduce people to patterns using > regexpal.com's interactive browser-based tool. The current regex lesson > doesn't --- it dives right into Python, which (a) adds cognitive complexity, > and (b) makes it inaccessible to non-Python workshops. > > 2. The existing lesson uses too much jargon. > > 3. And there aren't challenges for most parts. > > As the original author of this lesson, I feel I ought to clean all this up. > On the other hand, this would be a great opportunity for someone who's keen > to contribute to take on a medium-sized job for us... If you're interested, > please give me a shout.
Not volunteering ;), but just as a thought--I remember at one workshop Jessica McKellar gave a great introduction to regexps under the theme of "How to Cheat at Scrabble". I've never actually taught regular expressions myself (at least not under SWC), but if I were going to I'd probably want a lesson plan somewhat akin to that. It still got into plenty of the nitty-gritty of what one can do with regexps, but having Scrabble as a driving example made it really fun and relevant, and people seemed to have no trouble relating what they learned to other problems of pattern matching, etc. Erik _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
