madlibsThis lesson began with a quick discussion of Mad Libs. What are Mad Libs? How do you play Mad Libs? I was surprised to find that only about 5% of my middle school students had played Mad Libs. One student explained that, in Mad Libs, you are given a short story with blanks to fill with nouns, verbs, or whatever. When you read your finished Mad Lib, you (hopefully) get a funny, random story.

As a class, we discussed JavaScript, JSON, and Kate Compton's Tracery. We went to the Tracery Tutorial on Crystal Code Palace and began to familiarize ourselves with the JSON/Tracery "rules" (aka syntax). Like Mad Libs, there was a sentence with blanks (like #color# and #animal#) to be filled with colors, animals, or whatever.
{
"sentence": ["The #color# #animal# of the #natureNoun# is called #name#"]
, "color": ["orange","blue","white","black","grey","purple","indigo","turquoise"]
, "animal": ["unicorn","raven","sparrow","scorpion","coyote","eagle","owl","lizard"]
, "natureNoun": ["ocean","mountain","forest","cloud","river","tree","sky","sea","desert"]
, "name": ["Arjun","Yuuma","Darcy","Mia","Chiaki","Izzi","Azra","Lina"]
}

We took the example above (example 2 from Crystal Code Palace) and began to personalize it. We changed the "hashtags" (aka variables) and adapted the "lists" (aka arrays). We ended up with this...
{
"sentence": ["#name#, the #adj# #animal# from #place#"]
, "adj": ["fluffy","smart","invisible"]
, "animal": ["unicorn","duck","kitten"]
, "place": ["the ocean","Cabela's","Ohio"]
, "name": ["Caleb","Rover","Cartman"]
}

child-reading1416487375On Crystal Code Palace, we could instantly see the results from our code.

  • Cartman, the fluffy duck from Cabela's
  • Caleb, the invisible duck from Ohio
  • Rover, the fluffy unicorn from Ohio
  • Rover, the smart duck from the ocean
  • Cartman, the fluffy kitten from the ocean

The students worked individually creating their own sentences, adjectives, animals, places, and names. After school, I combined all of their JSON values (you can check it out on GitHub), created a Twitter account for our bot, and then posted the code on George Buckenham's Cheap Bots Done Quick. Soon, our Twitterbot was brainstorming book titles.
https://twitter.com/booktitlebot/status/645424665494745092
https://twitter.com/booktitlebot/status/645386928007839744
https://twitter.com/booktitlebot/status/645032078887780352
tweet2The next day, we discussed what a "bot" is, what a "Twitterbot" is, and reviewed what our Twitterbot had been tweeting overnight. A few minutes later, the students split into pairs and began working on their own Twitterbots.

Click here for the complete list of my students' Twitterbots


Podcast Recommendations

September 19, 2015

hp4Here is a list of some of my favorite podcasts:

99% Invisible - Documentary

A Little Dusty - Documentary

Between the Liner Notes - Music Technology Documentary

Clockwise - Technology Reviews

Comedy Bang! Bang! - Comedy

Criminal - True Crime Documentary

Slate's Culture Gabfest - Reviews

The Daily Show Podcast without Jon Stewart - Comedy Documentary

Death, Sex & Money - Documentary

Ear Biscuits - Comedy Documentary

hp3Freakonomics Radio - Documentary

Fresh Air - Documentary Reviews

Fugitive Waves - Documentary

Slate's The Gist - News Comedy

KCRW Here Be Monsters - True Crime Documentary

NPR: Hourly News Summary - News

NPR: Invisibilia - Psychology Documentary

The Late Show Podcast - Comedy Documentary

Lore - True Crime Documentary

Love + Radio - Documentary

APM Marketplace Tech - Technology News

hp2Mystery Show - Documentary

Note to Self - Technology Documentary

NPR Technology Podcast (Cancelled?)

Pitch - Music Technology

Planet Money - Documentary

Pop Culture Happy Hour - Reviews

Radiolab - Technology Documentary

Reasonable Sound - Music Technology

Reply All - Technology

Serial - True Crime Documentary

Slate's Serial Spoiler Specials - Reviews

hp1Song Exploder - Music Technology Documentary

StartUp Podcast - Documentary

The Story Collider - Documentary

This American Life - Documentary

TLDR (Cancelled?)

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - News Comedy

What's The Point - Documentary

WTF with Marc Maron - Comedy Documentary


giphy5My 7th and 8th grade Information Technology classes have been coding Twitterbots as an introduction to Javascript JSON programming. A bot is an automated program that performs a function on the internet like indexing webpages or sorting email. A Twitterbot is a software program that automatically posts to Twitter. Each of our bots is programmed to tweet a new, randomly-generated message every 10 minutes.

Here is the complete list of bots that we created this week:

https://twitter.com/booktitlebot/status/641999603274018816
BookTitleBot by the 7th & 8th Graders

https://twitter.com/shockingnewsbot/status/642160661905207296
ShockingNewsBot by L & Q

https://twitter.com/newvideogamebot/status/641851113386438656
NewVideoGameBot by J, C & T

https://twitter.com/restaurantbot/status/641992056320167936
RestaurantBot by J & D

https://twitter.com/shorttalesbot/status/642087681481162757
ShortTalesBot by M, M, A & K

https://twitter.com/lottonumberbot/status/642173239221837825
LottoNumberBot by T & N

https://twitter.com/beststorybot/status/642117879459115008
BestStoryBot by R, H & A

https://twitter.com/fantasybballbot/status/642049944837320704
FantasyBBallBot by D, C & L

https://twitter.com/statusupdatebot/status/642095227516387328
StatusUpdateBot by T, G & R
https://twitter.com/shrubbinatorbot/status/642158137252945920
ShrubbinatorBot by S, H & B
https://twitter.com/toynamerbot/status/642178276409085953
ToyNamerBot by R, M & K
https://twitter.com/newfashionbot/status/642178272705560576
NewFashionBot by G, B & M
https://twitter.com/rhymingbot/status/642175769049985025
RhymingBot by J & A
https://twitter.com/shoedesignerbot/status/642170730575208449
ShoeDesignerBot by C, R & N
https://twitter.com/lyriczbot/status/642178276925001728
LyriczBot by C & I
https://twitter.com/cartoonzbot/status/642140581372788741
CartoonzBot by M, W & K
https://twitter.com/singersbot/status/642065039256616960
SingersBot by W, A & E

Click here to read about how we learned to code our Twitterbots 

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