This 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"]
}

On 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
The 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

Here 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

Freakonomics 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

Mystery 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

Song 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

My 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