Parent Teacher Magazine Cabarrus County School January 2014 | Page 13

CMHS Student Creates Macro for Chinese Class, Prompts Mobile App Challenge
Hansel
Wei, a
student at
Cox Mill
High School,
has created
a macro
that would
allow him
to type
assignments
using the Pinyan form of Chinese. This form
of Chinese requires tone marks (like accent
marks in other foreign languages), and the
program used to type these tone marks was
not easy to use.
Hansel decided that there must be an
easier way to type the tone marks and set
out to figure out how to make it happen.
Hansel started out by creating a macro (a
single command that expands to complete
a more complex set of instructions). There
are 4 tones in the Chinese Pinyan language
so Hansel designed his macro to know that
when a Chinese word was typed, followed
by a number from 1-4, that the correct tone
mark would be displayed over the Chinese
letter.

He spent about an hour and a half
working on creating the macro, and then
another few hours making his macro look
nicer by adding a GUI (Graphical User
Interface). What took a lot of his time
was typing each word and the same word
with each of the accompanying tones so
that his macro would recognize which
commands would return which results.
Hansel then asked for permission to use
the macro at school to complete other
Chinese assignments and with the help of his
Technology Facilitator and the CCS IT Dept.
installed the macro on the compute ȁ