For weeks I’ve been thinking of writing a continuation to my Hamilton’s rule blog post and how to write an indexing variable to compute emotive relatedness. However, that is still very much a work in progress and I should try and turn the original post into a formal proof with some of the additional work I have done expanding upon it.
Yet, it really is time to lower my aim for a bit. I just finished my programming logic course and I’m hoping that financial aid will kick in in time for me to take C++ programming over the summer. Anyway, I got to looking at some of the material in my course text book, and there’s a section at the end of each chapter called “Game Zone” with small projects for logical game design. The first of these was to design a simple MadLib type program that prompts the user to enter some words and then puts them into a short story or rhyme. So I fired up my copy of portable PyScripter (it runs off a usb flash drive) and here’s what I came up with:
## Attempt at Mad Lib Program
## Liam Boyle
## Mainline Program
quit = “n”
##Inputting the words
while quit != “y”:
prompt = “Please enter the name of a color:\n”
wordA = input(prompt)
prompt = “Please enter a noun:\n”
wordB = input(prompt)
prompt = “Please enter a number:\n”
wordC = input(prompt)
prompt = “Please enter another noun:\n”
wordD = input(prompt)
wordE = input(prompt)
prompt = “Please enter an adjective:\n”
wordF = input(prompt)
prompt = “Please enter a place:\n”
wordG = input(prompt)
print (“\n”, “\n”, “\n”, “Baa Baa “, wordA, ” sheep,\n”,
“Have you any “, wordB, “?\n”, “Yes sir, yes sir,\n”,
wordC, ” bags full;\n”, “One for the “, wordD, “\n”,
“And one the the “, wordE, “\n”, “And one for the “, wordF,
” boy\n”, “Who lives down the “, wordG, “.\n”)
## mainline finished, continue question
prompt = “Do you wish to quit y/n?\n”
quit = input(prompt)
## End program
The data formatting could be better, and I still haven’t gotten to how to develop a GUI but it works and we have a MadLib style version of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” It then occurred to me, that this could be a great learning tool for young children to develop language skills. Provided I can come up with the right graphic interface and a “bank” of rhymes to draw from, this could be a really good educational game. The same basic I/O format could also be used form simple math problems and puzzles. Therefore, it might be beneficial form to to work on developing some simple educational games over the summer for the Pre-K, kindergarten, to 1st grade range. (Which coincidentally would be precisely my son’s educational level.) Unfortunately I missed the deadlines for this year’s Google Summer of Code, but there’s always the next.
End of thoughts for today.
Liam B
