Doug Peterson :: Blog

I am tired of having my traffic split between this site and http://mathfest.blogspot.com, so from now on you will have to go there to see what I have been writing.

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/regular-expressions-in-excel.ht

Once I learned a bit about regular expressions in Actionscript 2, I wanted to use them in Microsoft Excel.

It turns out that there is a VBA extension for Regular Expressions and a installable set of custom functions for Excel that includes regular expressions. To make it work, here is what I did:

1. In Excel, hit alt-F11 to bring up the code screen.
2. Choose Tools | References and check Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5
3. Close Excel.
4. Download and install Morefunc 5 from download.cnet.com.
5. Open Excel and start writing functions like "=REGEX.SUBSTITUTE(V2, " .......$| ....... |^....... |^......$|^.......$"," ???????? ")"

To learn more, check out the Morefunc documentation, sites like this, or sites that I referred to in my previous post. You can also write your own functions like lispy does.

Open Question: What do Excel for Mac users do?

Pretty soon you will be ordering this cup:

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/regular-expressions-in-actionsc

Regular Expressions are a powerful method of working with text strings based on dynamic patterns. For example, you might want to extract all the numbers from a string like "Michael travels 550km in 6.2 hours using 40L of gasoline", or replace any occurrence of "INV" followed by an arbitrary number of alphanumerics followed by a space with "- reference removed -".

Regular Expressions are useful in parsing user input or creating grammars for strings.

Flash decided not to support a RegExp class in Actionscript 2, though it is implemented in Actionscript 3, Javascript, and JScript.

Pavils Jurjans bemoaned this fact and created his own RegExp class for Flash 5, which was encapsulated by Joey Lott into a .as file for Actionscript 2. Pavils also created a very handy tester, which together with websina's page, helped me to get started with regular expressions.

The CLIPS programmers have started to use our version of the class, which has been documented with ZenDocs, and includes a trim, rtrim, ltrim and slightly modified replace method. A simple tester .fla is available to interact with the class.

I probably feel as excited learning this new skill as the fellow in this xkcd.com comic.

http://themobilelearner.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/jerry-seinfeld-on-the-blackb

A little comic relief concerning mobile devices:

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/running-dos-games-on-windows.ht

In my last post, I mentioned trying to get Colourful Math to work on Windows, collecting a few delicious bookmarks along the way.

Today, I downloaded dosbox after a bit of an internet search to get a sense of its reliability (since the zombie-like dude in the top corner did not inspire a lot of confidence). dosbox allows you to run all sorts of DOS programs under Windows, Mac and Linux - Doom and Railroad Tycoon (which is a free download now) seem especially popular.

When you run doxbox, type

• mount c: c:colourfulmath (where c:colourfulmath is the directory where the files are)

• c:
• dir
• cd clrmath
• 4colours (the bat or exe)
  

and voila!, you have a blast from the past in a nice tidy emulator (or virtual console?) window.



I received a very pleasant email from the Claude Laflamme, the developer (with Industry Canada funding) of Colourful Math. He indicated that his developer interest turned to lyryx.com and Colourful Math has not been ported to any more modern operating systems.

I was thinking that folks of a certain age (probably over 18) might like to know that there could be a way to play their favorite MS-DOS games on their current operating systems, using dosbox, if they are keen on having waves of nostalgia wash over them. My kids spent hours on the evaluation version of Soleau games like Wallpipe, Ant Run and Bolo Ball - which are still available - the rousing Sine Dancing-like antrun theme is playing on my speakers as I type (even after exiting!).

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCleverSheep/~3/7UOmp7KiGL8/its-ti

If the ideas you are about to hear are new to you, it's only because you haven't been paying attention. Voices scattered across the edublogosphere have been saying these things for some time. Maybe it just rings more true when a youthful learner says it?



Did you catch the sheep doing cartwheels at the end of this video?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCleverSheep/~3/n11rcOnnnaY/creati

A few weeks ago, I received a collegial email from Alma Taawo alerting me to a newly published teachers' guide on Creative Commons. Not only had the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) published a reader-friendly manual for teachers, they had licensed it for use, re-use and sharing.

Cool! Except... I don't speak Swedish.

As luck would have it, within a few minutes of putting out a distress call via Twitter, I was introduced to a Alastair Creelman. Born in Scotland, Alastair has lived in Sweden since 1983, and had already forged connections with the authors of the original document. After a few brief emails, the text translation was underway.

By coincidence, this correspondence took place in between Skype conversations I was having with group of 6th graders from Lawfield Public School in Hamilton, Ontario. Following up on an invitation from Zoe Branigan-Pipe I was introducing students to the potential of Creative Commons.

Just prior to a return check-in with the class, I'd had the privilege of viewing a video clip of Zoe's students teaching adults about blogging, including why they were adding Creative Commons licenses to their blogs. Not only had they taken the lesson to heart, but they were teaching others about what they'd learned.

Even though it would be fairly easy for a tech-savvy educator to re-publish the Swedish CC document, I decided then and there, that it would provide a perfect opportunity for Zoe's students to further share their expertise by contributing to Creative Commons in the Classroom, a teaching resource. The invitation, and the class' enthusiastic response, is documented in a recent podcast:



Creative Commons - Draft 1

Three Related News Items

1] You may be interested in visiting (or re-visiting) a presentation I posted last year. As proof that more people are learning about CC, it's been viewed some 15,000 times!

2] I'm making plans to provide a workshop on Creative Commons in August at the ABEL Summer Institute in Toronto. Join us if you're able. ;-)

3] This past weekend at TEDxNYED, Creative Commons pioneer, Lawrence Lessig, implored those present, to consider teaching and learning in a world characterized by openness and sharing.



If you or your students license your work with Creative Commons, I'd love to know about it. Please share your stories and hyperlinks as comments below.

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-useful-are-games-in-teachin

I have been thinking about this question for a while and the answer depends a lot on the type of games we are talking about. There are cross-number puzzles, ciphers to decode pun-ish riddles, drill and practice games, role-playing games, etc.

It may be that "game" is a organizer for "play" which is really a state of engagement. Students can engage in a game for hours, puzzling out the rules and feeling accomplishment.

I wish that I could be at Maria Andersen's presentation - Playing to Learn Math.



Does our view of Math education allow us to imagine a time when a robot could do a better job of much of our teaching, as the Koreans and Japanese are working on?

This week my daughter, who is studying Math at UW and is currently in a graph theory course, was reminded of a set of games that she played as a youngster - expressly designed to introduce colouring problems in an engaging way. They are MS-DOS based and I have got them to run enough to recognize the screens, but not really to enjoy.

When I am trying to get Sketchpad or Flash to produce a certain figure or interaction, I can enter an engaged state that social psychologists refer to as "Flow", which I find enjoyable.

Keith Devlin would like a couple of hundred million dollars to develop a MMP game that would allow players to construct math learning. I admit to being a tad skeptical, but what would such an environment be worth?

What role have games and play had in your Mathematical development?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCleverSheep/~3/ihAGIIHs8Ls/roger-

Last week, I had the good fortune of stumbling across 'The Essential Man' an Esquire article that reconnected me with storied film critic, Roger Ebert. The article prompted me to locate Roger Ebert's online journal, where he seems to be saying more than he ever did 'from the balcony'.

As much as I'm glad to see this man's passionate commentary in text, this morning, I learned that Roger Ebert can now communicate using synthesized audio built from samples of his own voice. To find out how this is possible, listen to Dr. Matthew Aylett, chief technical Officer at CereProc as he explains the technology on NPR's All Things Considered.



Voices in School
While we don't have access to Ebert's voice, staff and students in my district are coming to realize that they can leverage a range of voice-augmented assistive technologies including a talking word processor. In a workshop today, for a combined group of staff and students, my colleague Pat Hammond, introduced many of these Premier literacy tools. My interview with Pat, is episode #219 of the Teacher 2.0 podcast:



I suspect it won't be long before we see personal digital language assistants adopted as universal designs for learning.

Photo Credit: .m.e.c.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCleverSheep/~3/esDcrQbtXJY/digita

At the close of the Olympics, the chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), John Furlong highlighted the fact that Canadians were united in experiencing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

“I believe we Canadians tonight are stronger, more united, more in love with our country, and more connected with each other than ever before. These Olympic Games have lifted us up. That quiet, humble national pride we were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge seemed to take to the streets as the most beautiful kind of patriotism broke out all across our country."

I believe that modern communications technologies played a pivotal role in bringing us together for the past 17 days. If you were on Twitter during the Men's Hockey Championship, you felt it first hand. In today's podcast, I consider our evolving use of communications technologies as 'digital pheromones'.



In case you want to relive the games, check out the Boston Big Picture Site for Winter Games Part 1 and Winter Games Part 2.