Criteria A

Problem Statement:

Mr.Chan, my previous IB Latin instructor, is spending too much time manually assigning
macrons to Latin texts and scanning them in preparation for his lectures.

Description of Scenario:

My Client, Mr.Chan, is an IB/Honors Latin instructor at my school and is often busy

creating and editing lesson plans, slides, and worksheets for his students. A particular aspect of
this process is rather time-consuming for my client, which is putting macrons on all appropriate
words in the Latin text that he may teach to students. Furthermore, another integral part of
learning Latin is scanning text for long and short syllables, which is a task that can take up an
unnecessary amount of time when done manually. It is also difficult to find libraries of scanned
and “macronized” texts appropriate for the courses that he teaches. Because of this, he often
spends more time than necessary both scanning and accurately adding to texts that he assigns
to his students.

Rationale:

A computer program would be a good solution to this problem as it can be tailored to

automate this task, which would save my client a lot of time. Optimally, the Client would input
Latin passages/words into a text field and then have a program interpret that input to give an
accurate output as referenced with an external library. Python is the language I will use to create
this program due to the following reasons:
1. I am most familiar with the programming language and its capabilities regarding this
problem.
2. It is efficient in the way that it can handle external databases and libraries (such as
mySQL, Tkinter, CSV), as I predict to use as part of my solution.
3. It allows the construction of a user-friendly GUI in accordance with various imports and
packages.
4. It is easily configurable, so requests made by my client can be made without much
friction in the development process.
I will be using the PyCharm IDE to solve the problem, as it contains many features which would
allow for a more seamless transition from prototyping to testing to debugging. Also, it supports a
vast amount of pre-installed and downloadable import packages. Furthermore, there are
comprehensive guides available both in the IDE and online regarding how to use it in the most
productive manner.
Success Criteria:

Criteria for success include:

- The user will be able to scan properly formatted latin text for long and short syllables
accurately through a single input
- The user should not have to do any work in addition to typing the latin text in the input
box, and choosing which type of scansion (if applicable).
- The time to use the program for the task should vastly undercut the time needed to do
the process in a manual fashion
- The latin texts that are macronized/scanned should be added to an external library so
that it can be accessed later on if needed.
- The program must recognize Latin text apart from regular English text and prompt as
such.