Mother to Invention

My 9-year-old has introduced me to Wordle, a fascinating word cloud generator. Kids can control the color, font, layout and even the language of their Wordle. If they feel strongly about a word, they can type it more frequently and that makes it bigger.

My son’s 3rd-grade class has created several of these cool visual essays – one earlier in the school year to describe themselves and one just this week using terms they each came up with to describe slavery.

Try it yourself. We’re planning to use Wordle to make some personalized family gifts – framable art or maybe even T-shirts.

For grown-ups, the idea of distilling a topic to a collection of single words should make all you Twitter lovers chirp with glee. And what about applying it to news stories? Check out my Wordle on ABC News’ report of Polish president Kaczynski’s funeral. Can you still tell what the story is about?

As part of our modern inventors series, we’re going to try and bring you and your kids some insight behind the development of Wordle and other cool tools, so stay tuned.