Hi, I'm Lauren.
>> Hi, I'm Alvin.
>> I'm an instructor at a university nearby and I've been noticing that when
my students write their essays, they have
very long, very wordy sentences and I would
like to develop some kind of tool that they can use to keep track of
this and maybe perfect their writing style.
Do you think that's something you could do?
>> I think so. Let's start by helping me get acquainted with the students
in the class. So how many students do we have in this class typically?
>> Usually about 45 per unit, but I can have up to six units a semester.
>> 45 students, and six sections per
semester. That's a farily reasonable size. So,
do you know anything about what the students are using as far as computers go?
>> I don't know what kind of computers they're using. And they
could be, I don't know, anywhere from having no tech experience to
being pretty proficient.
>> Do you know anything about how
familiar the students are with computers in general?
>> I'm sure we have some people on the low end that have
never done any type of programming, and
then some people who are pretty self-sufficient.
>> Okay, and I guess my last question related to
the students is, what is the students actually submitting to you.
>> They've been sending just raw text files via email to me.
>> So from the sounds of things
we have a fairly broad, I guess base
of students to work with, both in technical proficiency
as well as their operating system environments potentially.
So I think what we'll probably do to start
off with is make a command line, Java
based tool. That the students can run and we'll
give them a fair amount of you know, documentation
on how to use the tool. And I expect
that there will be a lot of little error conditions that may happen
that we want to produce a reasonably friendly message were anything to go wrong.
>> Yeah. That'd be great.
>> So, a little bit more, I guess about
the actual essay itself, its submission, what constitutes a word?
>> I really only care about the longer words, so, is there a
way that we can only count words that are maybe above three letters?
>> I think
that's something we can do. And I think
that because you seem a little bit unsure
we might be able to have that be
a little bit more flexible than we otherwise would.
>> Great.
>> What does a sentence mean to you? Is it kind of flexible?
>> I would say anything that ends in a period or
even a question mark. Maybe even an exclamation mark. or, something
even, maybe even with a comma or semi-colon. I really only
care about the sentences that aren't gramatically correct and are too long.
>> I think we can probably make that a little bit more flexible too
so that way, you can kind of say we're going to, or you want to include them.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So maybe, sounds like you are little bit on the fence
about whether or not say, a comma should be considered a sentence.
>> Mm.
>> Entirely on its own or not. So we
can probably make that a little bit configurable as well.
And so, just to confirm the actual end result to
the student is the average number of words per sentence?
>> Yeah, yeah that'd be fine.
>> Okay, overall to start off with, looks like we have some
sort of customization of the word length that we want to look for.
>> Mm-hm. Yeah.
>> We have some kind of variability in
what we want to have as acceptable sentence structure.
So, periods, question marks, semicolons, things like that. And, the end result
to the student is if we're successful, they'll get the average number of
words per sentence. Otherwise we tell them something a little bit helpful to
kind of put them on the right track to use the tool correctly.
>> Yeah that's the error codes right?
>> Hopefully not error codes but something a little bit nicer.
>> [LAUGH] Okay.
>> So I think I have enough to
get started and produce something that's you know,
a reasonable I guess, rough draft. Of something
that you can use to help your class out.
>> Great. Thank you.
>> Thank you.