Implementation
2 hours
4. grade or older
2 hours
4. grade or older
2 hours
4. grade or older
Guess the Language
When we play Hangman, we start with vowels because we know they are the most common letters. But are all vowels equally common? Are there more A’s than E’s? Is U really the least common? And what about other languages?
In this activity, students count letters to discover how frequently each letter occurs in Slovenian texts. They then receive cards showing letter frequencies for other languages and try to identify the language in which different texts are written.
Of course, the activity also has a computational aspect. We will explore a model (histograms) built from letter counts across large collections of texts, which allows us to identify the language in which a given text is written.
Relevance to everyday life
Just like recommender systems, predictive models are everywhere. Meteorologists use them to forecast weather, banks to detect suspicious transactions, email inboxes to filter spam, mobile service providers to try and predict which customers will switch to competitors, drug developers study the effects of new compounds, and cars are getting better and better at recognizing obstacles on the road.
Connection with the curriculum
The topic of the activity is languages, it belongs in any language lesson.