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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.
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.
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:
Education & Academic

Help Fix Maths Education at the Computer-Based Maths Education Summit

When was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation by hand? If, like me, you haven't needed that particular skill since high school, then you've probably wondered what all that fuss was about! And it's a good question: why did we spend so much time on those puzzling, formulaic second-degree beasts, using up pencils and erasers like they were going out of fashion, just to find the value of x? The truth is, in the real, working world of 2015, the value of that pesky x will invariably be found by a computer. The sooner education acknowledges this fact, the better. So says Conrad Wolfram, whose Computer-Based Maths (CBM) initiative is using Wolfram technologies to bring computers and coding into mainstream maths curricula around the world.
Education & Academic

Summer Schools: Wolfram Science and Wolfram Innovation

For three weeks this past July, Wolfram held the annual Wolfram Summer School for over 60 students from around the world. They came to work on projects ranging from aperiodic hexagonal tessellations to computer language grammars to political sentiment microsites. The overarching theme was entrepreneurial science. Participants employed cutting-edge computational tools like Wolfram Programming Cloud, machine learning, and a whole variety of new functions from Version 10.2 of the Wolfram Language.
Education & Academic

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.
Education & Academic

Wolfram Language Summer School Oxford 2015

The first Wolfram Language Summer School Oxford---AKA Ecole d'été 'Informathiques' (click here for the French version of this blog post)---took place June 22 to July 3 at Wolfram's European headquarters just outside the historic English university city. Twenty-nine French students and three teachers traveled across the English Channel to attend the school, which drew scholars from the Créteil and the Nice and Versailles academies, as well as the Lycée d'Altitude de Briançon. The summer school was a result of the partnership between Wolfram, the three academies, and the INRIA Mediterranean Research Center.
Education & Academic

Throwing the Hackathon Gauntlet with Some Friendly Team Coding

It's no secret that Wolfram loves hackathons, or that our technology is ideally suited to the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of these events. We've supported and/or participated in HackIllinois, MHacks, LAHacks, and many other hackathons. Given how much fun those have been (and just because we can), we decided to host a hackathon for Wolfram staff, pitting our talented and driven developers against one another to see what kind of out-of-the-box projects they could create with our technologies. In truth, the spirit of camaraderie and collaboration that is central to Wolfram could not be set aside, and the final projects were the result of shared ideas and teamwork.
Education & Academic

A Smart Programming Language for a Smart Cities Hackathon

On Friday, February 20, I had the pleasure of giving a talk to a group of young and smart individuals enlisted to represent Barcelona in the Global Urban Datafest. For this hackathon, the organizers offered one Raspberry Pi platform per team and a variety of sensors to capture physical parameters. Their list of suggested project topics included data acquisition and actuation, monitoring and management, security transport and mobility, the environment, and more. The event lasted three days and was locally organized by Anna Calveras and Josep Paradells with the help of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona's City Council, iCity Project, Urbiotica, IBM, and Wolfram Research.