Inspired by the NY Times Spelling Bee, I challenged myself to create a Scratch version of this game.
Rules: Words must be at least 4 letters long, and must contain the yellow center letter. Letters do not have to be adjacent to each other, and duplicating letter is allowed. I created the background hexagons with Google Drawings and Inkscape. In Scratch, I created a “dictionary” based on English word list from: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5cy3vcsag29ic43/Word_List.txt/file
I also created letter frequencies based the following sources:
https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
I got a great suggestion from Nirmala Sankaran, Co-Founder of HeyMath, to include the total possible words for a given board. This required iterating over the dictionary and checking if each word is valid for each board, given the game rules.
You can find the original code here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/603333011