Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

2015 Wolfram Summer Camps Exceed Expectations

We say it every year, because it is true, but once again this year’s Wolfram Summer Camps were the most successful yet. Thirty-eight students from seven different countries attended our camps at Bentley University this July. Students came to camp with some prior programming experience, but most had little or no familiarity with the Wolfram Language. In nine short days, however, they were able to produce amazing results.

Collage of Summer Camp students

This summer was a little different than the past three years. In addition to offering the Mathematica Summer Camp, we introduced the Wolfram Tech Innovation Summer Camp.

Mathematica Summer Camp and Wolfram Tech Innovation Summer Camp

Participants in both camps spent much of their time with each other, each morning concentrating on project time and Wolfram Language training. The Tech Innovation students, however, attended three afternoon sessions that focused on entrepreneurialism and the future of technology, given by Stephen Wolfram.

Stephen Wolfram speaking with students

The Mathematica Summer Camp students worked on exploring a computationally interesting phenomenon, while the Tech Innovation students created more applied programs with FormFunction and CloudDeploy.

We want to share some of this phenomenal work with all of you and show off their accomplishments, but with thirty-eight projects there is just too much for one blog post. This collage represents the completed Demonstrations and web deployments created during the camps. You can visit the Tumblr page to check out each one. Follow us there for updates and to see the full scope of the students’ creativity, as some are still working hard to perfect their projects.

Summer Camp projects

For the closing ceremonies, we analyzed the student projects and discovered that the two camps used around 450 built-in Wolfram Language functions over 5,300 times. To get an idea of the most popular functions, here’s a graph of the top 15 used:

Graph of top 15 functions used at Wolfram Summer Camp

We also generated a word cloud with the top 200 functions that the students used in their projects. While Thickness was the most popular, the students employed a variety of functions to create their projects.

Top 200 functions WordCloud

Thank you to everyone at Wolfram Research, especially the mentors for their dedication to seeing the students succeed, and congratulations to the participants of the 2015 Wolfram Summer Camps! You did an amazing job, and we are extremely proud of every one of you.

2015 Summer Camp students with Stephen Wolfram

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1 comment

  1. Your summer camp students created some amazing final projects! My calculus students do a final project like this after AP tests. Next year, I’ll be sure to share this blog post with them.

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