Each student chose a quote from one of four categories: Love, Challenge, Lead, Change. We created a spreadsheet to calculate the frequency of each letter in their quote - this took some effort. Students decided to include punctuation in the counts. Once we knew the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, etc in each quote, we found a common ratio to convert the frequency of each letter into inches. A common ratio would allow us to compare quotes and distribution of letters among all students. Students decided to make 8 e’s = 4 inches, 3 a’s = 1.5 inches, etc. Students also had to consider the number of wooden bars we had in determining the ratio also.
The first day in the steam lab students cut square dowels to the required lengths for each letter in their quote. We created the keyboard template in Adobe Illustrator and inserted the quotes as images. Some students hand wrote their quote while others chose a font in Google Docs and took a screenshot.
Our final day in the lab students glued the bars onto the keyboard. We were able to display the finished products vertically on a wall and the end result was fantastic.
