Lesson plan 2025-06-02 by Richel¶

• Date: 2025-06-02
• Author: Richel
• Lesson plan
• Evaluation
• Reflection

Morning 1: smarter command-line¶

I am scheduled second:

Time	Topic	Teacher
9:00-10:00	Linux pipe, wc, cut	BB
10:00-10:15	Break	.
10:15-11:00	grep	RB
11:00-11:15	Break	.
11:15-12:00	awk	RB

I should assume the learners can use a pipe.

grep¶

My learning outcomes are:

• Learners can use ., *, +, ?, [], [^], {}, () in regular expressions
• Learners can use grep for pattern matching
• Learners have practiced using a book on bash/Linux

Add LOs are:

• Learners have experienced that grep is a filter
• Learners have sent text to grep using a pipe, e.g. man grep | grep "[^A-Z]
• Learners know there are multiple flavours of regular expressions: use grep and grep -E

As sources of text, I consider to use:

• ‘Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus’, from a plain text file at Project Gutenberg
• man grep or yelp man:grep or man grep | grep "^[A-Z]"
• https://www.regexone.com/
• [Shotts, 2024] download and can be found in this repository at books/the_linux_command_line.pdf
• man grep | grep “^[[:upper:]]”

Using the grep manual and https://www.regexone.com/ felt like the best options.

Fixing the layout is harder, e.g. getting mermaid to work, making the admonitions prettier (fails).

I will give up on mermaid:

I think this session is ready now, but I can imagine writing the next session may influence it, so let’s write the next session first, before creating a video.

awk¶

It used to be sed and awk in an earlier schedule. Commit 7282e58552cdbeb7bf70b0f3133ac2bee7702a33 moved sed to Day 2. I will accept: we (me and BB) are probably both working in the weekend, so let’s accept this change.

My LOs are:

• I can use awk
• Learners have practiced using a book on bash/Linux

I’ve inherited the first one from BC and BB and is simple enough, unlike the ones for grep, where I added some details.

I will add some LOs:

• I can use awk in pipes
• I can use regular expressions in awk
• I can use awk to read a specific column
• I can use awk to transform text

Non-LOs:

• I can use awk to analyse a file: the day is called ‘Smart command-line’

Books to use:

• Bash Beginners Guide chapter 6, from section 6.2 to section 6.2.3 seems to work in my context
• Advanced Bash Scripting Guide, page C2. Awk is a micro primer, with some usefulness
• A practical guide to learning awk: uses files, not pipes
• Gawk: Effective AWK Programming: too complex for the LOs
• The Linux Command Line: no chapter on AWK
• Introduction to Linux: no chapter on AWK
• Linux Fundamentals: no chapter on AWK
• Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide: no chapter on AWK
• Advanced Linux programming: no chapter on AWK
• Linux From Scratch: no chapter on AWK
• Beyond Linux From Scratch: no chapter on AWK

I will use the Bash Beginners Guide.

Mapping sessions to LOs:

• 6.2.1: I can use awk in pipes
• 6.2.1: I can use awk to read a specific column
• 6.2.2: I can use awk to transform text
• 6.2.3: I can use regular expressions in awk

Seems this works!

I will map these to exercises, and adding a ‘Can awk do …?’ section.

Teaching¶

I want to practice my Mike Bell teaching cycles. I feel the Feedback phase is weakest, hence I added this explicitly to the materials and schedule time for it. I have written a schedule in my sessions and in my notebook: I intend to keep track of the actual timing.

During Challenge, I will put them into breakout rooms of 2 or 3, as this is better for learning, as well as a better place to answer questions.

My biggest worry is Zoom. I’ve switched to a new computer, installed Zoom there, but it seems to prefer to work via the browser. I’ve just checked it -and it was good I did!- as it required an update. After updating, I went through all the settings and I now have better settings, e.g. that sharing my screen only takes 1 instead of 3 dialogs (1 dialog asks to share a window or a screen: I’ve set this to always share my screen)! Took me 10 minutes and I am happy I had the time to go through this.

I predict there will not be time to let the learners do even the essential exercises. I will mention this to them, so they are less disappointed. I think this problem is worse for AWK, as it has less time and its video is longer:

Session	Scheduled time	Video duration
grep	45 minutes	27 minutes
AWK	40 minutes	31 minutes

I do think AWK is useless, so I hope we can remove this in the next course iteration. Instead, sed feels the more natural session after grep.

• [ ] In next meeting, suggest to remove AWK from the schedule

There are 40 registrations, so I expect 27% (same as the NAISS File Transfer course) to show up, which is 11 learners.

References¶

• [Shotts, 2024] Shotts, William. The Linux command line: a complete introduction. No Starch Press, 2024. (in books/the_linux_command_line.pdf)