With some impressive new features, new forums, and many new members, Wolfram Community has had a great year. As we approach the end of 2015, we wanted to share a few highlights from the last few months' excellent posts on the Wolfram Community site.
An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language is available in print, free on the web, etc. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to write another book. My last book—A New Kind of Science—took me more than a decade of intensely focused work, and is the largest personal project I’ve ever done. But a […]
The One-Liner Competition has become a tradition at our annual Wolfram Technology Conference. It's an opportunity for some of the most talented Wolfram Language developers to show the world what amazing things can be done with a mere 128 characters of Wolfram Language code.
More than any other programming language, the Wolfram Language gives you a wealth of sophisticated built-in algorithms that you can combine and recombine to do things you wouldn't think possible without reams of computer code. This year's One-Liner submissions showed the diversity of the language. There were news monitors, sonifications, file system indexers, web mappers, geographic mappers, anatomical visualizations, retro graphics, animations, hypnotic dynamic graphics, and web data miners... all implemented with 128 or fewer characters.
The first of three honorable mentions went to Richard Gass for his New York Times Word Cloud. With 127 characters of Wolfram Language code, he builds a word cloud of topics on the current New York Times front page by pulling nouns out of the headlines:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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