Wordle

How can we find a good starter word for using Wordle?

Wordle Assessment Google Doc

Time: 2-3 90-minute periods.

Part 2: Crunching Data:

When students come in, the data needs to be collected into one spreadsheet. Have students copy their data into the master spreadsheet.

Questions to ask:

How many people played? How many starter words did we get? How can we use this information to beat the game quicker? How can we determine if these are good starter words? What makes a good start word? What is the most popular starter word? These are things we can answer from the data. We can see if the start word is a good starter word by looking at the frequency of letters. Does this list show we are playing the game correctly? The bolded question is what we are going to try to determine. If we have good starter words we should be able to win in fewer turns.

Make sure everyone makes a copy of the spreadsheet so that they are working on their own, not the master. Including me!

The data needs to be cleaned. We need to have a better organization than the list. This is the raw data. How can we represent this data to show the starter words? Through a frequency chart. This will give us the top words in our community. We can sort the data and then count, but let the computer do the work for you. You create a Pivot table (Insert Pivot Table) Pivot tables help us get numerical data from this categorical data. This can also help to group large data sets too.

Check in 1: Does the frequency chart tell us if these are good starter words? How can we get that information?

Have students develop a plan to determine this. Can they think about what kind of data we can use to figure it out?

No. We need to take a look at the frequency of the letters and see if they match the frequency of letters in most common words. Similar to how cryptology would break code. We can find the letter frequency by using formulas in the spreadsheet. This formula page tells you how to count a letter. Because we need to count all 26 letters we can use a row at the top for the letters. The formula then becomes Len($A2)-Len(SUBSTITUTE($A2,B$1,"")). Dollar signs are used to force the columns and rows to stay the same. Since formulas when copied go by reference. This is an absolute reference for more information see Alice Keeler.

Steps to get the frequency in google sheets:

1. Copy the words from the pivot table since we don’t need repeats into a new sheet in this workbook.

2. In the top row put the letters of the alphabet

3. Use the formula and copy it across and down. You can click and drag across the lower-left-hand corner and double-click on the lower-left-hand corner of the cell box to fill down.

4. Freeze the top row of the letters

5. Scroll to the bottom of the words and add totals using the Sum formula

Now we need 5 letter words and see what the frequency of the letters is to see if our starter words match. How can we find this data? How can we find a good list of all five-letter words? What are the most popular letters and how many words contain these letters?

This list of 5 letter words is almost our control data. This will give us the top frequency of 5 letter words (as this may vary compared to all English words). We can compare our sample top letter frequency to this. How does the sample data change the top 5 letters?

First find a data set:

Students will explore data sets that are available to use and determine the best one for the question we want to answer. Let Google search 5 letter words in English. Talk about the challenges of getting data from websites and that it’s best to have data in a format that is easy to import and manipulate (excel, csv, txt). Provide them with the following data sets and have them choose one to use.

Check in 2: Which one will help you get to where you want to go? Voting on which data set we should use and why?

(Don’t put them in this order), in the presentation the top two are the ones that I would use. The other two require more cleaning of the data. This is when a discussion that data may need to be cleaned happens. Ask the students what is good or bad about each of these pages and use them with a spreadsheet. The second sheet has fewer words and won’t take as much time to crunch. Have them repeat the process that was done on the Nouns with 5 letters (Number 2) and then have a discussion. .

1. https://github.com/charlesreid1/five-letter-words/blob/master/sgb-words.txt

2. https://www.wordexample.com/list/nouns-with-5-letters

3. https://7esl.com/5-letter-words/

4. http://www.poslarchive.com/math/scrabble/lists/common-5.html

5. https://github.com/dwyl/english-words