Blog ~ Avi Megiddo

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

Tangrams in Google Slides

TANGRAMS by Avi Megiddo

TANGRAMS by Avi Megiddo.pptx

#GoogleSlides #Tangrams #GAFE #GoogleSuiteforEducation #lowfloorhighceiling #visualspatial

To play, you will need to edit this file, and you can make a copy by clicking
‘File’ –> ‘Make a copy’

Click the ‘Shift’ key while rotating pieces to snap to common angles.

Implementing Tangrams in Google Slides makes a lot of sense for online/blended learning. It builds multimedia literacy skills, visuospatial skills, and a deeper understanding of how Google Sheets work.

This material is suitable for primary mathematics, PYP Design, and MYP Design

Creating the Tangrams set from scratch in Google Drawings is a good high-ceiling activity, and a way to teach unit conversion, proportions, aspect ratio, and more.