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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
Products

MHacks 6 Brings Hacking to a Higher Level

MHacks is a hackathon hosted by the University of Michigan every year that brings together a diverse group of students to redefine the modern perception of hackers as criminals or programming experts and to make something amazing. At this year's MHacks 6, Wolfram was proud to be a sponsor and see our technologies in action in several of the group projects. Last year's winners, Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs, returned with new teammates Sam Oliver and David Renardy as Team Fusion Furniture. Their hack, which tied for first place in Best Use of Wolfram Technology, allows users to turn photos and pictures from their phones into custom, 3D-printed tables and chairs. Team Fusion Furniture used the Wolfram Language and Wolfram Development Platform (formerly known as Wolfram Programming Cloud) to "generate, export, and email the 3D model from the images" and for other back end needs.
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

The Coffee “Flavor-Rator”

I drink too much coffee---it's one of my few vices. Recently, my favorite espresso machine at the Wolfram Research headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, was replaced with a fancy new combination coffee and espresso maker. The coffee now comes in little pouches of various flavors, ranging from "light and smooth" to "dark and intense". There even is a "hot chocolate" pouch and a way to make cappuccinos using both a "froth" pouch and an "espresso" pouch. Here is a picture of the new coffee selection:
Arnoud Buzing, Director of Quality and Release Management
Leading Edge

Wolfram Community Featured Posts: Reddit’s 60-Second Button, Raspberry Pi, and More

Wolfram Community connects you with users from around the world who are doing fun, innovative, and useful things with the Wolfram Language. From game theory and connected devices to astronomy and design, here are a few posts you won't want to miss. Are you familiar with the Reddit 60-second button? The Reddit experiment was a countdown that would vanish if it ever reached zero. Clicking a button gave the countdown another 60 seconds. One Community post brings Wolfram Language visualization and analysis to Reddit's experiment, which has sparked questions spanning game theory, community psychology, and statistics. David Gathercole started by importing a dataset from April 3 to May 20 into Mathematica and charted some interesting findings. See what he discovered and contribute your own ideas.
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: AnglePath

A brilliant aspect of the Wolfram Language is that not only you can do virtually anything with it, you can also do whatever you want in many different ways. You can choose the method you prefer, or even better, try several methods to understand your problem from different perspectives. For example, when drawing a graphic, we usually specify the coordinates of its points or elements. But sometimes it's simpler to express the graphic as a collection of relative displacements: move a distance r in a direction forming an angle θ with respect to the direction of the segment constructed in the previous step. This is known as turtle graphics in computer graphics, and is basically what the new function AnglePath does. If all steps have the same length, use AnglePath[{θ1,θ2,...}] to specify the angles. If each step has a different length, use AnglePath[{{r1,θ1},{r2,θ2}, ...}] to give the pairs {length, angle}. That's it. Let's see some results.
José Martín-García, Algorithms R&D
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Language Artificial Intelligence: The Image Identification Project

“What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when. I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of intelligence, much of […]

Stephen Wolfram
Computation & Analysis

Instant Apps for the Apple Watch with the Wolfram Language

Note added 04/30/2018: Due to changes around Apple Watch and WatchKit, the Wolfram Cloud app does not currently support Apple Watch. The functionality described in this post remains available for other mobile devices. My goal with the Wolfram Language is to take programming to a new level. And over the past year we’ve been rolling […]

Stephen Wolfram
Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: GrammarRules

The Wolfram Language provides tools for programmatic handling of free-form input. For example, Interpreter, which was introduced in Version 10.0, converts snippets of text into computable Wolfram Language expressions. In smart form fields, this functionality can automatically translate input like "forty-two" into a Wolfram Language expression like "42." But what does it take to perform more complicated operations or customize responses and actions? For that you need a grammar. The grammar indicates the structure that should be matched and the action that should be taken using information extracted from the match. A grammar gives you natural language control over your computer so that you can process language snippets to yield functions that perform commands. For example, telling your computer to "open a website" requires mapping snippets like "open" and "a website" to the Open command and the URL of a website.
Jeremy Michelson, Manager of Data and Semantics Engineering
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