Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2015 October

Education & Academic

New Books Using Wolfram Technologies Show Diverse Applications of the Wolfram Language

We're well into fall, and even if you're not a student anymore, who can help but think of books as the weather starts to turn and the leaves begin to change? Here at Wolfram, it's been an exciting season for new books and authors exploring geometry, differential equations, graphics, and more with Wolfram technologies.
Jenna Giuffrida, Content Administrator, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Community Is Turning 10,000

Community is about to turn 10,000! Members, not years. We launched Wolfram Community in July of 2013. After two short years, it has grown to just a hair's breadth away from 10,000 participants. Join now and help us reach this milestone! We'll award prizes to new members with the most creative profiles who join until the day we hit 10,000. The five people with the most detailed and creative profiles will get a one-year subscription of Wolfram|Alpha Pro and one million Wolfram Cloud Credits. Wolfram Community profiles allow flexible formatting (here is an example), so use it fully. An additional grand prize will go to one of the winners---a personally signed copy of Stephen Wolfram's upcoming book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language. In your Wolfram Community profiles, tell us about what you've done and dream to do with Wolfram technologies. The best dream wins! We have seen many great posts and built new features for the convenience of our members. Today we're excited to unveil a number of usability improvements, starting with what we call "email notifications."
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Computation & Analysis

Democratic Presidential Debate Word Clouds

The first Democratic debate of the 2016 election season has finally come to pass. Although the Democratic party has less than half the number of candidates as the Republican party, this event was just as lively and saw just as much hype. As we did for the two GOP debates, we used last night's transcripts of everything the candidates said to create linguistic images using the WordCloud function. In case you missed our previous posts, WordCloud is a Wolfram Language function that allows anyone to visualize words, sized by their frequency in a text. With just one line of code, you can create a word cloud graphic from data, text, or URLs.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: Civics

I hope you've enjoyed the Wolfram Language in the Classroom series. Today is the fifth and final post in the series and I'll be talking about introducing more data into civics and social studies classrooms. One of the great things about this lesson is that the data can be drawn from your location, giving it a personalized feel. This lesson employs a computational thinking methodology by asking students to create and support claims by analyzing data.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: History

It's on to history for the Wolfram Language in the Classroom series. History and social studies have the potential to incorporate lots of real-world data to examine relationships between politics, economics, and geography. The Wolfram Language comes with built-in knowledge on a wide variety of topics, including historical events, financial information, socioeconomic data, and geographic data. We've mentioned previously in this series the computational approach to thinking that introducing the Wolfram Language into a classroom environment supports; in a social studies class, this approach allows students to find connections by analyzing real-world data. In the following lesson, I'll show you how to help students explore connections between major war battles and historical financial data using the Wolfram Language. By way of example, here I'll use the Vietnam War.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: Chemistry

Welcome to day three of the Wolfram Language in the Classroom series. I hope you've enjoyed the lessons so far. Today I want to show you how data built into the Wolfram Language can be used in the chemistry classroom. The Wolfram Language has information on over 44,000 chemicals and thus provides a perfect environment for chemistry students to do comparative, data-driven analysis. The unique advantage of using the Wolfram Language for computational thinking in a chemistry class is that it allows students to analyze curated data to create hypotheses and show correlations in a new way.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: English

It's day two of the Wolfram Language in the Classroom series, and I'll be bringing coding into an English class today. For the most part, educators and administrators consider programming a tool only for STEM courses. While coding in the Wolfram Language is excellent for STEM, it is an invaluable tool for many other subject areas as well. Using the Wolfram Language in an English class supports a computational approach to critical thinking, which allows students to collect and analyze data to become reflective writers. In the following lesson, educators can prompt students to write just a little bit of code to reflect on their written work.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: Math

This post is now available for download as a CDF file in the following languages: Chinese, German, Japanese, and Spanish. Download the Wolfram CDF Player for free here. Welcome to the first in a series of posts on using the Wolfram Language in the classroom! Each day this week my colleagues and I will share some of our thoughts about how to use the Wolfram Language in various classroom settings. Each post will focus on a different subject and will provide an example lesson for instructors to use with their students, complete with the appropriate grade levels, goals, and procedures. Our lessons are designed with the principles of computational thinking in mind, and we will highlight specifically how these lessons fit into that paradigm. Today I'll discuss a subject the Wolfram Language was born and bred to tackle: math. But since there is so much to do with math in the Wolfram Language, we need to focus on a specific aspect. I want to talk about how to use the Wolfram Language to create exploratory tools that allow students to develop their intuition and curiosity without the pressures of rigorous formalization.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
Education & Academic

Literary Analysis and the Wolfram Language: Jumping Down a Reading Rabbit Hole

As summer wraps up and students are hitting the books once again here in the US, it's fun to explore how the Wolfram Language can be used in the classroom to analyze texts. Take the beloved classic Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll as an example. In just a few lines of code, you can create a word cloud from its text, browse its numerous covers, and visualize its emotional content. Jump right in by creating a WordCloud:
Peter Barendse, Senior Math Content Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Math Content Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group