Try it out for free here!

THE PROBLEM

Word searches can be a great way to build a summary activity for reading a story, article, or book. However, they are time consuming and difficult to make.

THE SOLUTION

text2wordsearch uses the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm to automatically extract the top key words from a blob of text! Simply copy the text from the article or story and choose how many words you want in your word search. Then copy the word search into your favorite word processor (be sure to use a monospace font!). The keywords selected are found in the bottom box.

The technical details are that this uses an AWS Lambda function to run the RAKE algorithm and generate the word search, ingesting the text from the web interface above which is deployed on AWS API Gateway. The Lambda function is written in Python and leverages two excellent packages: python-rake and word-search-puzzle. Because it is a Lambda function they had to be installed to a directory and uploaded as part of a zip bundle along with my function code. This zip is included in the repo linked below for you to deploy and play with yourselves!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

Try it for free here!

As always, the code is available to browse and deploy yourselves!