News, Views & Insights
With many schools transitioning to remote learning for the remainder of the school year, educators face the challenge of maintaining the same quality of education as in-person lessons. Here's a collection of the resources offered by Wolfram Research and others to help educators in an e‑learning environment.
Communities the world over are bracing themselves for impact from the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Many school districts in particular have already suspended sessions for several weeks to come—and understandably, parents and educators feel anxious about navigating at-home learning (among the variety of other concerns brought about by a pandemic!).
Professionally, a large part of what I do at Wolfram involves working with educators, students and organizations, and empowering them with the technology to think computationally. I know of several parents with older kids who are now at home, enrolled in schools that are not completely prepared to provide online instruction. While the internet is awash with curricula, it can be a challenging task to assess the quality, relevance and usefulness of each course, given the amount of what is out there.
For decades now at Wolfram, we’ve been committed to the creation of cutting-edge technology and resources for classrooms. Let’s take a look at our wealth of free online resources for quality education while at home.Given the current discussion of quarantines, sick leave and controlling community outbreaks, many people around the world have been prompted to wonder “Can my business run with a remote workforce?” or “Can my students learn and be productive without coming into the classroom?” The answer, we’ve found, is yes—and we’ve got decades of experience as a largely remote company to guide you, your school, government lab, university or company as you make the understandably challenging transition to working remotely.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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 […]
Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. 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.
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.