Friday, January 13, 2017

Self-Generating Teacher

I used the "10 Things I Want to Learn:" pages of the klepto journal.  But I cheated.  I wrote eleven things.  Because I know not the laws of this world (and none of my eleven are those).


I quite like the concept of these analog pages with my jokes (and my two serious topics), but it would be interesting to make a digital product for them.  My digital product would be a self-generator of instructive text.  Essentially, typing one of my eleven topics into the generator would result in a random answer output.  There would probably be a separate, limited pool of answers for each topic, though I could add some scrambling to make the answers even more random.  For a topic like "Who let the dogs out" there could be a pool of individuals with a random draw of one, two, or three of the individuals as an answer.  The pool could resemble this list: Batman, Robin, George Clooney, You, Me, The Real Slim Shady, Kanye, Mrs. Robinson.  For some of the topics, the answers could be more complicated, like full paragraphs for "How much wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."


The main purpose of this digital product, as with the analog, would be humor.  I like writing comedy, though I rarely do (because it's hard).  I think this generator could be pretty funny.  For the two serious topics ("How to play the violin" and "Welsh") the generator would probably spit out links to videos of complex examples of the two.  Beyond humor, this generator, I believe, could give food-for-thought for some of the great, funny questions of life.  And, heck, doesn't everyone wonder where the socks go?  Maybe this generator could one day aid in this Grailic quest.


I'm not quite capable, at this point in time, of making this self-generating teacher, but I hope to be able to make it some day soon.  Python is one candidate for software, and there are probably other programs I don't currently know of that would work well too.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Patrick, this sounds like a good idea. I would love to see it when you are done with the whole thing.

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    1. Thank you. I'm not sure that I'll ever actually make it, but I might. This is mainly meant to be hypothetical, an assignment for my Writing for Digital Media class. Thanks for dropping in!

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