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Wolfram Programming Lab Now Available in Beta

The Wolfram Language provides a unique opportunity to revolutionize programming education, and we've been working on ways to deliver the language for students and educators. Today we're making available a beta version of Wolfram Programming Lab. You can access it free on the web in our Wolfram Open Cloud. There are subscription versions that provide additional capabilities on the web and that include native desktop versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Wolfram Programming Lab is an interactive programming environment that contains dozens of "Explorations"---step-by-step guides to creating programs with tiny amounts of code. Each Exploration gives the starter code for a program, and students are encouraged to dive in and change the code to create something new. Students can also challenge their understanding by solving exercises in the Go Further sections available in most Explorations.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
Education & Academic

I Wrote a Book—To Teach the Wolfram Language

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 […]

Stephen Wolfram
Computation & Analysis

A Year of Runkeeper: Analysis and Visualization

About a year ago, I decided to record every single move I make using Runkeeper, and now I want to make some visualizations of my activity throughout the whole year. This is a fairly straightforward project where I will download the data from Runkeeper, then use the Wolfram Language to process, analyze, and visualize my activities. I will show how to create animations like this one that superimposes 24 minutes of all my activities recorded in Barcelona:
Bernat Espigulé-Pons, OSW Operations
Education & Academic

Special Event: The Hour of Code with Wolfram

The global Hour of Code event is almost here, and we’re excited to announce that Wolfram will be celebrating this year with a free workshop at our headquarters in Champaign, Illinois. Even if you’ve never programmed before, you can experience the excitement of creating your first website by the time you leave. The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in over 180 countries. It gives a short introduction to computer science and shows how anyone can get involved. Join us as we celebrate the Hour of Code! Programming experts will be onsite to help demystify code and demonstrate that anyone can learn the basics. This is a wonderful opportunity to try your hand at a new skill, and have a great time in the process.
Dana Flinn, Project Administrator, Public Relations
Products

Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler 4.2

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Today marks the release of Wolfram SystemModeler 4.2. I'll outline some of the new features and improvements we've done since Version 4.1. You could say that there are three main pieces to this release: usability, performance, and integration. Let's take them one by one.

Usability

The first improvement you'll notice as a user opening the product is that the diagram area is easier to understand, with crossing-line detection and joint connection points marked with solder dots:
Johan Rhodin, Kernel Developer, Mathematica Algorithm R&D
Education & Academic

’Tis the Season to Be Coding! Wolfram Cyber Week Savings

It's that time of year again and the holidays are upon us. Whatever your gifting traditions, Wolfram has perfect solutions for the tech lovers on your shopping list. From now until December 6, we are offering Cyber Week savings around the world, including North and South America, Australia, and parts of Asia and Africa.
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

Mechanical Engineering Landing Gear Example: Wolfram SystemModeler

Background

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Teachers and textbook authors often need to simplify a real-world problem to pinpoint a specific area to work with—for instance, the examples in a textbook. However, even in real-world engineering, simplifying a problem can bring clarity when our understanding might otherwise drown in a sea of details. In this blog, we will design the landing gear for a helicopter. I have chosen the example of landing gear because the simplification to one degree of freedom gives accurate results and is typically how the problem is treated in textbooks. The solution is attainable through hand calculation. But a more subtle understanding of the problem can be gained using the Wolfram Language and Wolfram SystemModeler.
Håkan Wettergren, Applications Engineer, SystemModeler (MathCore)
Best of Blog

Aspect Ratios in Art: What Is Better Than Being Golden? Being Plastic, Rooted, or Just Rational? Investigating Aspect Ratios of Old vs. Modern Paintings

Paintings of the great masters are among the most beautiful human artifacts ever produced. They are treasured and admired, carefully preserved, sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and, perhaps not coincidentally, are the prime target of art thieves. Their composition, colors, details, and themes can fascinate us for hours. But what about their outer shape---the ratio of a painting's height to its width? In 1876, the German scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner studied human responses to rectangular shapes, concluding that rectangles with an aspect ratio equal to the golden ratio are most pleasing to the human eye. To validate his experimental observations, Fechner also analyzed the aspect ratios of more than ten thousand paintings. We can find out more about Fechner with the following piece of code:
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: RandomPoints

Picking random points on the surface of a sphere so that the points are uniformly distributed is not as straightforward as you might think. Naively picking random spherical coordinates ϕ and θ will not give a uniform distribution of points. The problem is important enough to warrant a dedicated article in encyclopedias, such as Wolfram MathWorld (see Sphere Point Picking). Uniform sampling from Sphere[] is now available in the Wolfram Language with the RandomPoint function: In fact, RandomPoint can be used to uniformly sample from any bounded geometric region, in any dimension. In 2D:
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
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