My students are working on software that takes in large quantities of text and spits out stats on things such as the number of words, frequency of letters of the alphabet, number of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, or more letter words, and average length of words in a sentence. We get the raw text from www.gutenberg.org. I was quite surprised to find out that most of my students did not know who Gutenberg was and what his contribution to society was.
They have to choose 3 literary works and run them through their software and report back with graphs. Our initial tests showed that 'j' was not a very popular letter in most literacy texts. Matter of fact it is the 4th least used letter. My name starts with J so I was a little ticked off. It turns out that Shakepeare wrote a whole play (Henry the 5th) without using one 'J'. I can only suspect he wrote that play right after Romeo and Juliet and was tired of writing our J's. Go figure. You would have to work really hard to avoid using the letter J.
Apart from digesting large quantities of text they are learning how to graph and chart. There is a great freeware product called TeeChartOffice by Steema Software that we use. It is highly recommended.
Shelley is working late at Taylor's tonight and I am doing some programming in Delphi (Pascal) which is something I have not done for a year. I forgot what a great programming environment it is.
TTYL,
Jim
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment