I’d like to do an intro to regular expressions.
I would use some simple examples using the ipy-notebook, where I go into the very basics of regex and then let the students do some pattern matching of wikipedia-entries (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rodents, where they need to extract a list of species)
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Ok, finally got to write this final edit.
I managed to hold a little intro to regex to 7 computer-science students.
It was part of a “international TA” workshop that I had to take part in, to be able to TA this semester (I’m doing 3 Intro-Bio labs this fall).
I gave a short introduction into basic regex syntax, when it makes sense to use it (the example was big ecological and biological datasets that are usually pretty messed up) and some of the special characters. It was mostly tailored from the python regex operations page (http://docs.python.org/2/library/re). I then took a short text and gave a few examples for how to get different characters in there.
There were mostly students from India, I’m not sure whether it’s a cultural thing, but I didn’t get much feedback, except that everyone “liked” it, whatever that means…
Given that I’m now teaching the intro-bio labs, I’m getting more experience in teaching and it’s quite nice to actually have 3 labs, so I can test different approaches, even though it’s quite a lot of work. If I were to teach the same regex class again, I would do things quite differently. I would probably introduce a problem and let them think about how to solve it in different ways. I think this would provide for a nice way of figuring out their prior knowledge without having a dull session of asking whether they’ve done XY and Z before.