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ThesaurusBrontosaurus

Christopher D. Granz
December 10, 2009

Overview

Thesaurus Brontosaurus is a word game in which a player tries to match synonyms to words displayed at the top of the window. The player "fires" synonyms at words which they believe match the synonym, and the words disappear if they are correct. Words and synonyms are randomly downloaded from freethesaurus.net.

Screenshot

Concepts Demonstrated

• Higher order procedures are used throughout.
• Data abstraction is used to provide access to the graphical and game elements.
• Symbolic language processing is used in the HTML parser.
• Recursion for iteration is used for all list structures which vary in length.

External Technology

The standard Scheme networking library is used to request dynamic pages from freethesaurus.net which are then parsed by procedures from the Scheme XML library. The synonyms as well as the words for each sequential round are collected in this way. The process is randomized to make for more interesting rounds.

Another standard Scheme library for graphics and animation is also used to provide the user interface to the game. Innovation

This game is intended to be highly interactive and random, to provide for the most enjoyable and educational experience. Since new levels are essentially downloaded on-the-fly, the game have the potential change automatically as the online database grows and evovles. Technology Used Block Diagram

Additional Remarks

Full source code to be available on http://www.arcadianelectronics.com (follow the links to software).