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, 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
In an effort to explain Binary Search, I created a simple “I guess your number” game:
I wrote a Scratch controller that works with Makey Makey to automatically time a Pinewood Derby race. After successfully connecting the circuits with Makey Makey, this software can time a 2-car race.
To simulate closing the timing gates, hold down the space bar, left arrow key, and right arrow keys.
To simulate starting, let go of the space bar.
To simulate the blue car finishing the race, let go of the left arrow key.
To simulate the red car finishing the race, let go of the right arrow key.
Based on https://www.rapidonline.com/makeymakey
Inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKzZKgLKiks
Note: This only works if the keyboard you are using has N-Key rollover, allowing multiple keys pressed to be recognized simultaneously.