That’s Crazy

One of the highlights of any teacher’s life happens when you run into successful former students. It’s such a big deal when it happens. Before social media, you might run into one of your students at a grocery story or something.

With social media, it’s so much easier. You don’t have to be in the same place at the same time. I’m always so happy when I get a note from the past.

My path had crossed with @JeffClark a bit in the past. There’s information in his bio that led me to poke around and see some of his work. It’s quite impressive. His work in the classroom was always over the top so I wasn’t too surprised. I had to smile when I thought of what we would consider primitive programming by today’s standards but it was the only game in town when we were in the classroom.

Last week, Jeff reached out again noting that I had this fascination with Wordle. As I told him, I think it’s every programmer’s dream to create a passion project and have someone come along and pay money for it.

As it turns out, Jeff has developed his own Wordle-like application. He calls it CrazyPhrase and invited me to play with it. I’ll admit to being intimidated when I first saw it. With Wordle, you have six guesses to find a five letter word and I’ve been known to go to the wire with it.

In CrazyPhrase, you have a number of words that form a phrase and only seven guesses to get the correct answer. The odds seemed to be against me. As with Wordle, close counts and visual clues like green being a letter in the right place, yellow being in the wrong place but in the right word and blue being a good letter for the phrase but placed in the wrong word. Since I typically play the game as the coffee is kicking in, it’s tough. What makes it easier is the fact that you’re looking for an actual phrase. I’m just happy that nobody is in the room here to see me mouthing out words…

Here’s a screen capture of the Friday game.

Lest you get too impressed, solving one of these puzzles in four moves was a real anomaly for me. My strategy is just to fill the blanks with random words before I even think about developing a phrase.

Like the Wordle game, there’s an opportunity to share your results. In addition, he’s given you a bit of a statistical summary of how you did.

Since this game is unique, he gives you additional puzzles to play around with and develop your abilities.

You can play the game here http://crazyphrase.com/. If you’re a fan of the Wordle type of game, give Jeff’s a shot.