Making it Rhyme

Our previous project dealt with free-verse constructions of random elements combined into imagist arrangements of juxtaposed appropriations, so for the current project, we’re tackling those more familiar constraints of poetry: meter and rhyme.

Doing this in Python requires several new concepts like functions, conditionals, and loops, and some new tools – specifically PyCorpora and Pronouncing.

Rather than give you (my students) a complete, working example of this, I thought it would be more helpful to give you an example in progress, presented to you in video form piece-by-piece as I assemble it.

Inspired by Daniel Schiffman’s Coding Train videos, and motivated by a desire to figure this out, I’ve made a series of videos. Thanks to the green screen studio at UMW and the assistance of the excellent Cartland Berge, I filmed these so that I’m standing in front of my code and explaining it as I work through the example.

Clearly, I’m not as energetic or charismatic as Daniel Schiffman, and I’m moving pretty slow through this example, but hopefully that helps. It’s a video, so you can always speed it up!

So students: use these videos to see how far along you can get with this project. Use your own poetry template and swap out whatever parts of it you can.

If these videos makes sense and help, then let’s use the time in class to debug and workshop your projects. Enjoy!