I am teaching Rebecca some more programming by helping her make a word game called Wordchuck. It scrambles six letters, and you try to find the words hiding in them. Having a game to play together makes the programming more fun. There is a woodchuck, of course.
I wanted to work on breaking a problem into smaller jobs: choose the letters, shuffle them, build a guess, and check it against a dictionary. The behind-the-scenes part tries different letter arrangements to find the possible answers. That was a good chance to talk about solving a smaller version of the same problem. Clicking a letter also needs to remember that we have used it, even when two letters look the same.
