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