Automating the Creation of a Science Lesson plan

Jul 4, 2010
Mark Alexander Bain

Automate the Creation of a Science Lesson Plan - Mark Alexander Bain

The need to create a science lesson plan adds to the amount of work that every teacher needs to do. However, Linux scripting can help automate this task.

The hardest part of teaching science is not the teaching itself. The hardest part of teaching science is maintaining all of the paperwork that is associated with the teaching.For every science lesson taught the teacher will have to produce a science lesson plan.

The problem is, of course, that it may take the teacher as long to produce the science lesson plan as it does to teach the science lesson itself. Fortunately the science teacher can minimise the time used to produce each science lesson plan by automating the process. If they are a Linux user then they can make this automation process fairly painless.

The First Step to Automating a Science Lesson Plan: Installing Ubuntu Linux

Many science teachers will be Windows users and the thought of moving to a new operating system may seem quite daunting, especially if they have much of their work already based on Windows. That may have been a problem in the past, but not now. It is now easy to download Ubuntu and then create a dual booting computer. Once that's been done then the teacher can start their computers in either Windows or Linux mode according to their needs.

It's also worth noting that all of the Windows files are available in a Linux session and many Windows applications (such as Microsoft Office) may be run using a Linux application called Wine.

Automating a Science Lesson Plan: Creating a Lesson Plan File

An important aspect of using Linux is the ease with which any user can create script that can automate their tasks. In the case of a science lesson plan teacher will need to:

identify the objectives of the lesson
identify any differentiated learning
work out the timing of any activities

This can all be done using a simple script:

echo "Which lesson is this? "; read lesson #Get a title for the lesson filepreffix=$(date +"%Y%m%d") #Get the date filesuffix=$(echo $lesson | sed s/" "/"_"/g) #Format the title filename="$filepreffix.$filesuffix" #Define the file name to be used #Get the objectives objcount=1 while [ "$obj" != "0" ] do echo "Enter Objective $objcount: (enter 0 to finish)"; read obj obj_list="$obj_list|$object" let objcount=$objcount+1 done echo $obj_list>$filename #Get the differentiated learning outcomes: echo "Enter Differentiated Learning Outcomes"; read differentiated echo $differentiated>>$filename #Build the lesson plan echo "Enter number of lesson segments: "; read segment_count while [ $segment -le $segment_count ] do echo "Enter length (in minutes) of session $segment: "; read segment_length echo "Enter session activity"; read segment_activity #Write the segment to the file echo "Segment $segment | $segment_length | $segment_activity" >> $filename #Check how many minutes have been used grep "^Segment " $filename | awk -F"|" ' BEGIN {x=0 }{x = x + $2} END {print "Total",x,"minutes"} ' let segment=$segment+1 done

If this is saved as a text file (for example "lesson_planner" then it can be run:

chmod +x lesson_planner ./lesson_planner

In this example the script creates a text file containing the lesson plan.

Automating a Science Lesson Plan: Viewing Lesson Plan File

The content of the lesson plan can be viewed from the command line, for example:

cat 20100704.my_first_plan

Or the file can be loaded into spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc or, with a little more work, loaded into a database to be shared with the rest of the the school or college.

Mark Alexander Bain - Mark Alexander Bain is a writer, Mo Bro and consultant for all aspects of software development at dsquared. He has also written regularly ...