Episode 1 - March 3rd | 5pm

Whether you want to play Wordle-like games more than once a day, or you think there is a niche in the word game world that hasn't been filled yet, you might be thinking about making your own word game.

 In this episode I'll show you how you can make your own text-based word game in Python. With nothing more than VS Code we'll have our word game up and running! From this simple framework we'll see how so many variations have been created!

 Our personal word game will give us the perfect jumping off point for creating game solvers and AI algorithms in later weeks! You could even take what you make, and turn it into a website with the next word game hit!

Episode 2 - March 10th | 5pm

Everyone is talking about it, what is your Wordle first word?

Plenty of articles and videos have taken a look at this from different perspectives, but I've got a new one for you - Yours!

That's right, I'm not here to tell you how to play Wordle, I'd rather you just have fun (and learn some fun data science along the way). So I'll take you on an journey of code and data through some different first word strategies. We'll check out how a well en-vowel-ed word stacks up against the consistently consonant-ed, and see if there is a way to bring these two opposing philosophies together for better results.  Ultimately we'll get to the bottom of how our first word can set us up for a great second word.

There will be lots of great learnings, useful to your regular coding needs, not just Wordle! I'll share my favourite tips and tricks for dealing with data in Python, showing you the awesome things you can do with Jupyter Notebooks, and MatPlotLib. You'll learn how easy string and data manipulation are in Python, and how with some quick data processing we can turn our thoughts about what is important in a first word into tangible data, graphs, and strategies. 

So come along, share your first word ideas and preferences in the chat, and see how data shapes your first word ideas, or vice verse!

Episode 3 - March 17th | 5pm

So far we’ve made a Wordle-like game, and then thought about the best first words for when you play. The next obvious step is to make a computer play the game for us!

We’ll build a Wordle player in the hopes of beating the game we wrote in episode! We’ll pick up where we left off, after the first word, and figure out what words remain, what is the most likely, and how we can program our player to make strategic guesses. We’ll consider whether gambling on getting something right on the second guess is worth it, or if playing on hard mode could be futile given the information we have on hand!

Episode 4 - March 24th | 5pm

In the final episode of What in the World-le, we’ll see if AI can help us out with our word game solver, as we delve into the world of Natural Language Processing!

At the end of our previous episode we had a Wordle solver that choose words based on a scoring system we designed using text analytics. But, this doesn't take into account that not just any existing five word can be the correct answer. The correct answers are chosen from a smaller curated collection of well known words.

We'll take a look at how NLP could help us pick more well known words by using an Azure Machine Learning pipeline to convert our words to numerical representations. Using some clever calculations to compare our numerical word data we'll hopefully discover which words are well known, and which words are too obscure to ever be the answer!