BlueSky is the microblogging site for me these days. That is where I am getting ideas and information about teaching computer science among other things. I recently saw the following message.
It’s an obvious possible coding project in my eyes.
- Read a word from a wordlist
- Remove the last letter and place in in the front of the word
- Determine if the new string matches an actual word.
- Display both old and new word, if found
- Repeat
It’s probably easy coded by an AI of course though I suspect students might come up with interesting implementations on their own as well.
As was pointed out in replies on BlueSky things get more interesting if they lead to a discussion about the nature of words. For example, a lot of words that end in “S” and plurals of words. Is there a way to strip plurals from a data set programmatically? (I’ve been thinking about that for my Wordle solver program as Wordle doesn’t use plurals.)
And what is the usefulness of word lists if they have words that are not really words? Or that are not in common use?
We don’t tend to talk about data integrity, data validity/validation, normalization of data, or any kind of data checking all in K-12 CS classes. We probably should discuss it though. A project like this might be useful in getting that conversation going. Just a thought.
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