My name is Avi Megiddo. I am a design, math, and computer science teacher and curriculum developer based in Taiwan. I create learning engagements with low-floors, high-ceilings and wide-walls, based on real-world needs.
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from U.C. Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Education from Purdue University, where I majored in Curriculum & Instruction with a concentration in Learning Design and Technology.
Please check out my blog posts and projects:
Inspired by the NY Times Spelling Bee, I challenged myself to create a Scratch version of this game.
Rules: Words must be at least 4 letters long, and must contain the yellow center letter. Letters do not have to be adjacent to each other, and duplicating letter is allowed. I created the background hexagons with Google Drawings and Inkscape. In Scratch, I created a “dictionary” based on English word list from: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5cy3vcsag29ic43/Word_List.txt/file
I also created letter frequencies based the following sources:
https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
I got a great suggestion from Nirmala Sankaran, Co-Founder of HeyMath, to include the total possible words for a given board. This required iterating over the dictionary and checking if each word is valid for each board, given the game rules.
You can find the original code here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/603333011
I believe learning should be fun and memorable. We all possess our unique set of talents and skills, including musical, spatial, aesthetic, linguistic, analytic, mathematical, kinesthetic, social-emotional, leadership, organization, planning, and more. Educators should differentiate their instructional approaches and learning environments to cater to all kinds of learners.
During my free time, I enjoy swimming, hiking, and designing stuff; mostly in Google Slides these days. Please have a look at some of my projects and papers. Feel free to contact me at megiddo at gmail dot com.
Below is a wordcloud I made using https://www.wordclouds.com/
I fed it a large text file of my academic writing, after cleaning it up using regular expression matching. Can you find my first name? Can you find my last name?
