The Love Calculator

Once a week there is an early-evening activity in the ICT room in which the children can relax after a long day in school and simply play some games or catch up on some work (one Year 8 girl created another Olympic QR code poster). A couple of the year 8 girls were ‘playing’ on www.lovecalculator.com and as I was learning all the gossip from Year 8 I challenged them to work out the ‘code’ behind the Love Calculator. Working with them we started systematically by trying A loves A which gave a result of 0%. We then tried A loves B and got 0% again. We kept getting 0% until we tried A loves E which gave a result of 13%. One of the girls then suggested it would only work with the letters in the word loves which we tried and we discovered that…

• l = 10%
• o = 31%
• v = 33%
• e = 13%
• s = 1%

If there was more than 1 of each letter then the score was simply increased so that two l s equalled 20% and so on.

We also then discovered that if you had too many letters (for example four os) then the score began to subtract.

Anyway, this just goes to show that a ‘pointless’ activity can be turned into something more.