Team 1: Word Wall

Inspiration

Our inspiration to create this program was from English class. Learning is a lifelong journey and we are always trying to improve/expand our vocabularies and learn new words. Keeping track of each new word learned as well as its meaning can be quite difficult. We created this program to allow users to store words along with the meanings of those words. This program made it much easier to keep track of all the new words and was very helpful. We hope that it can help others too!

What it does

This program allows users to input words with their meanings to maintain a dictionary which the user gets to create! The program asks a variety of things including if the user would like to input a new word with its meaning, modify any words/meanings, search for the meaning of a word and also makes sure that there are no errors such as searching for a word that does not exist (it then asks if you would like to add that word to the dictionary) and adding a word that already exists.

How we built it

Using Python 3.8.0, we built our program by starting off with taking inputs from the user. We then made sure that the word(s) given is/are not in the word wall already. Then we added the word with its meaning to a dictionary and assigned them as a key and value pair. (The word being the key and the value being the value.) We then printed the entire dictionary. We then coded the program to ask the user if they would like to search for any specific words. This makes the program easy to use when there are too many words to scroll through and find the meaning. It allows user to find the meaning of the exact word, instantly. We coded it using a for loop which runs for the number of words they would like to find and prints the corresponding meaning to the word. (It finds and prints the value of the required key.) We then proceeded to code the program to ask the user if they would like to modify a word/meaning. The user can say yes and can change the spelling of a word or a meaning of a word. This was done by using a loop in which the new word/meaning is given, the old word/meaning is removed, and the new word/meaning takes the spot. Finally, in the end of the program, we simply printed all the words with their meanings once again. The main concepts we used were for loops, dictionaries, lists, many variables, user input gathering, if statements, and print statements.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that we faced as a team was figuring out how we should satisfy the topic of Lifelong Learning. This topic was one that no one on our team had encountered before. Throughout the many events that were held this weekend, we were able to finally understand the topic at a deeper level and Word Wall was the answer we got from it. The other challenges were from creating the code. The team was quite familiar with Python 3.8.0, but there were some concepts that we had to learn while we built the program. One of these being the concept of dictionaries. We knew little about dictionaries, but our group had decided that this would be one of the main concepts that were going to be used in Word Wall.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the accomplishments that our team achieved while going through this experience was extensive. But to highlight a few of our accomplishments, finding out ways to search through a dictionary so we can get the meaning of the inputted word and being able to change the meaning of the word the user had inputted. These accomplishments were weather difficult as our team was quite unfamiliar with python dictionaries.

What we learned

Our team had learned many things throughout this experience. Brampton Library Brainy Hacks has been quite fun and a great endeavour for all of us. During the competition, we learned how to utilize dictionaries in python and how to use if statements and for loops in combination to achieve what we wanted with our code. We also learned many things outside of coding such as how important lifelong learning is and how much it can benefit us in our lives. We found out about elevator pitches and how to efficiently convey our product in just 200 characters through the workshops that were available to us. All around this experience had been a blast for the entire team and we hope to part take in Brainy Hacks next time.

What's next for Word Wall

The next step for Word Wall is to implement a piece of code which allows the dictionary to be saved every time the user opens the file. This would eliminate the need for the user to input all the words and meanings every time that they open the file.