Monkeys and Poetic Typewriters

Inspiration

We wanted to make something that made poems, and thought it would be fun and potentially useful for Valentines day.

What it does

Users can pick from two poem structures and two themes, standard and haiku, and neutral and love. The program then picks words from several lists separated into nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, and adverbes and attempts to fit them into sentences with the correct syllable counts. Once it succeeds, the sentences generated and printed onto the screen as a poem.

How we built it

Using our blood, sweat, and (not really) tears.

Challenges we ran into

Two challenges that we ran into were syllable counting and verb conjugation. We began by attempting to count syllables using vowels, but that obviously did not work because of diphthongs and silent letters. These issues were slowly cleared out through trial and error. Verb conjugation remains an issue, as the only verbs we use in the program at this point are regular intransitive verbs and regular direct transitive verbs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this project is actually the first for the entire team, we are very proud of having made this poem generator despite its numerous problems and wonkiness. We have generated several funny poems as well as oddly deep ones, which were all very fun for us to read.

What we learned

For the three fourths of us who have never coded before, this project offered a lot of insight on what goes on behind the creation of a program. It was difficult for us to picture what had to be done to start with, but Elia, who had some programming experience, was able to guide us through by assigning us individual tasks. Through that, we were able to learn some basic coding while contributing to building the project.

What's next for Monkeys and Poetic Typewriters

Right now, our word lists are relatively small and we have not worked out all the technicalities of sentence syntax that need to be fixed. Word lists are also relatively small, and we would like to expand them to give more diversity and expressiveness to our poems. Monkeys and Poetic Typewriters does not have any UI whatsoever either, because neither of us had the time nor skill to make one, but it would be interesting to have one later on. Primarily however, there is an odd glitch that, at the time of the submission of our project, we were unable to identify the cause for that must be dealt with before anything else. (Post time limit edit: this glitch was fixed before the submission limit, please disregard that last phrase, this was due to miscommunication within the team)