...and when we talk about pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in instructor training, this is exactly the kind of thing we mean. If someone would like to boil this down into a PR against the instructor's guide (instructors.md) of either shell-novice or python-novice-inflammation so that we can pass it on to future generations, that would be wonderful.

Cheers,
Greg

On 2015-12-04 4:56 PM, Karin Lagesen wrote:
Just wanted to say thanks for the great suggestions!

Will try to incorporate and see what happens :)

karin


On 12/3/2015 4:23 PM, Tyson Whitehead wrote:
On December 3, 2015 10:24:44 AM Karin Lagesen wrote:
The more I teach, the more I realize that I am not really able to convey what a for loop does to everybody. Do any of you have a metaphor or something that you use for teaching it? I explain about variables and collections, and the body of the loop, and I show examples, but I am still not able to get through all the time.

How about starting with the unrolled version and then introducing for as a better way to write it. For example

   print "hi there, "bill"

   print "hi there, "sue"

   print "hi there", "bob"

Ask what is similar about all these? What is the underlying "template"? Try and get them to identify something like

   print "hi there", name

Then, in terms of this template, the above is

   name="bill"
   print "hi there", name

   name="sue"
   print "hi there", name

   name="bob"
   print "hi there", name

 From there perhaps it isn't such a big stretch to go to

   for name in ["bill","sue","bob"]:
     print "hi there",name

especially if there is some way to step through this last one in a debug mode so they can literally see what it is doing.

Cheers!  -Tyson



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Dr. Greg Wilson    | gvwil...@software-carpentry.org
Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org


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