This computational thinking activity involves analyzing a misspelling of a person's name and discover how to use Spreadsheet functions (specifically UNIQUE and COUNTIF) to identify those misspelled patterns and generate quantitative results.  NOTE: If you decide to use Excel, the Unique is actually a feature of Data - Advanced and you select the column and click on Unique...you will have the option of copying to another column.

Google receives billions of queries a day. This type of data helps improve the suggestions for spellings and results. Without misspellings, it would be much more difficult to find patterns and develop algorithms to guess at what people might mean with a query. While humans are great at finding patterns in small sets of data, it is helpful to use formulas to aggregate the data into human understandable results.

Below is a sample of query from people searching on Google for [Halle Berry]. This shows how often people used each type of spelling:

Halle Barry

Halie Berry

Haley Berry

Hailey Berry

Hale Barry...