February 20, 2020 — Zoe Goldenfeld, Business Analysis
We all know Wolfram|Alpha is great for solving calculations and math problems, but not everyone knows about the full breadth of useful data it provides. I entered college as a biology major and was quickly overwhelmed with the amount of information I had to memorize. Class lectures moved at a fast pace, and often my notes had gaps in them where I hadn’t finished writing down what the professor was saying before she moved on. I was up late at night making flashcards for tests and searching desperately through Yahoo! Answers, trying to find information like what exactly the alimentary system does (hint: it “functions in food ingestion and digestion; absorption of water and nutrients; secretion of water, acids, enzymes, buffers and salts; waste excretion; and energy storage”—thanks, Wolfram|Alpha!).
Thinking back on those late-night study sessions, I would have saved a lot of time if I had properly used Wolfram|Alpha as a study tool. Because I was a biology major, many of the areas in which I most frequently sought information were related to scientific fields such as chemistry, but Wolfram|Alpha can be a valuable resource in so many more areas. Here are 15 applications of Wolfram|Alpha in topics beyond mathematics. I hope you will find these to be useful both inside and outside the classroom!
December 12, 2019 — Ishwarya Vardhani, Education Partnerships Manager, Partnerships
Happy Hour of Code! There’s no better reason to start learning or continue honing your programming skills than the Hour of Code, an annual celebration of computer science during Computer Science Education Week. While we like to think that every hour is a great hour to code, we look forward to the Hour of Code event as an opportunity to come together and share some of our best Wolfram Language resources for students. Since its 2013 launch, the Hour of Code has been an immense success, introducing valuable programming skills to millions of students. So with this year’s Hour already underway, let’s take a look at the ways you can get started!
November 26, 2019 — Jessica Wong, Editorial Content Manager, Document and Media Systems
It’s been another big year of exploration with the Wolfram Language. CEO Stephen Wolfram’s new book takes us on a tour of his computational adventures throughout the years. We’re also excited to introduce a Spanish-language version of the popular An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, as well as books to enhance the mathematics and engineering curricula. There’s something new for everyone, from students to lifelong adventurers, to discover with the Wolfram Language. Just in time for the holidays, find the perfect read for those who love learning new things—including yourself!
Adventures of a Computational Explorer
Join Stephen Wolfram as he brings the reader along on some of his most surprising and engaging intellectual adventures, showcasing his own signature way of thinking about an impressive range of subjects. From science consulting for a Hollywood movie, solving problems of AI ethics, hunting for the source of an unusual polyhedron, communicating with extraterrestrials, to finding the fundamental theory of physics and exploring the digits of pi, this lively book of essays captures the infectious energy and curiosity of one of the great pioneers of the computational world.
October 24, 2019 — Stephen Wolfram
Wolfram Notebooks on the Web
We’ve been working towards it for many years, but now it’s finally here: an incredibly smooth workflow for publishing Wolfram Notebooks to the web—that makes possible a new level of interactive publishing and computation-enabled communication.
You create a Wolfram Notebook—using all the power of the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Notebook system—on the desktop or in the cloud. Then you just press a button to publish it to the Wolfram Cloud—and immediately anyone anywhere can both read and interact with it on the web.
It’s an unprecedentedly easy way to get rich, interactive, computational content onto the web. And—together with the power of the Wolfram Language as a computational language—it promises to usher in a new era of computational communication, and to be a crucial driver for the development of “computational X” fields.
October 8, 2019
Ankit Naik, Sales Engineer, Wolfram MathCore
Matteo Fasano, Postdoctoral Researcher, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
How can you make teaching come alive and be more engaging? For many educators, the answer turns out to be not so much a single solution, but rather a set of tools that can vary according to subject and even by student. So today, I want to add something new to the pedagogical toolkit: Wolfram Virtual Labs.
Wolfram Virtual Labs are open educational resources in the form of interactive courseware that are used to explain different concepts in the classroom. Our ambition is to provide an easy way to study difficult concepts and promote student curiosity.
For this post, I spoke with Dr. Matteo Fasano about his experience with using Virtual Labs as a course complement in the masters’ courses in which he acts as a teaching assistant. He also told me why and how he supported the Wolfram MathCore group to develop the CollegeThermal Virtual Labs (now available) and how they can help teachers or instructors make learning more engaging.
September 17, 2019 — Brian Wood, Lead Technical Writer, Document and Media Systems
Our interactive Multiparadigm Data Science (MPDS) course has been up at Wolfram U for over a month now, and we’re pretty satisfied with the results so far. Hundreds of people have started the course—including students from our first Data Science Boot Camp, who joined us at Wolfram headquarters for a three-week training camp. Thanks to the success of the boot camp, we have also had several projects submitted for advanced MPDS certification, which will soon be available within the interactive course.
But what exactly does it mean to be a practitioner of MPDS? And how might the multiparadigm approach improve my computational projects? To find out, I decided to try this free course for myself.
September 12, 2019 — Stephen Wolfram
The Next Big Step for Wolfram|Alpha
Wolfram|Alpha has been a huge hit with students. Whether in college or high school, Wolfram|Alpha has become a ubiquitous way for students to get answers. But it’s a one-shot process: a student enters the question they want to ask (say in math) and Wolfram|Alpha gives them the (usually richly contextualized) answer. It’s incredibly useful—especially when coupled with its step-by-step solution capabilities.
But what if one doesn’t want just a one-shot answer? What if one wants to build up (or work through) a whole computation? Well, that’s what we created Mathematica and its whole notebook interface to do. And for more than 30 years that’s how countless inventions and discoveries have been made around the world. It’s also how generations of higher-level students have been taught.
But what about students who aren’t ready to use Mathematica yet? What if we could take the power of Mathematica (and what’s now the Wolfram Language), but combine it with the ease of Wolfram|Alpha?
Well, that’s what we’ve done in Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition.
August 15, 2019 — Abrita Chakravarty, Training and Development Specialist, Wolfram U
A few weeks back, we announced Wolfram U’s latest open online course: Multiparadigm Data Science (MPDS). This course gives a hands-on introduction to basic concepts of data science through a multiparadigm approach—using various types of data, modern analytical techniques, automated machine learning and a range of interfaces for communicating your data science results. Our goal is to increase your understanding of data science while allowing you to take advantage of multiparadigm insights—whether you’re a newcomer working on a simple problem or an expert using well-established methods.
As the content creator and instructor, I’d like to provide some background on myself and my approach to the MPDS course. Beyond doing data science, I’ve found that multiparadigm principles make both teaching and learning more effective. In this post, I’ll give insight to the design of the course—the main goals, what topics are included and how to use the built-in interactivity to get the most out of your experience.
July 19, 2019 — Jamie Peterson, Technical Programs Manager, Wolfram U
Wolfram U’s latest interactive course, Multiparadigm Data Science, gives a comprehensive overview of Multiparadigm Data Science (MPDS) through a series of videos, quizzes and live computations, all running from the Wolfram Cloud. Using real-world examples, this free course provides an introduction to MPDS, strategies for improving your process and building your ideal toolkit, and the Wolfram Language functionality that makes it easy to implement.
April 9, 2019 — Alec Titterton, CBM Content Development Manager, European Sales
Wolfram Research is pleased to announce further collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of supporting makers across the world through education. A collection of 10 Wolfram Language projects has been launched on the foundation’s projects site. These projects range from creating weather dashboards to building machine learning classifiers to using AI for facial recognition. The goal is to put the power of computational intelligence into the hands of anyone who wants access—democratizing the skills that will increasingly be needed to innovate and discover what is possible with modern computation.
By providing easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorials that result in a finished, functioning piece of software, Wolfram aims to lower the barrier of entry for those who wish to get immediately started programming, building and making. Projects can be completely built on the Raspberry Pi or within a web browser in the Wolfram Cloud.
