Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

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Wolfram Language in the Classroom

Education & Academic

How to Teach Computational Thinking

The Computational Future

Computational thinking is going to be a defining feature of the future---and it's an incredibly important thing to be teaching to kids today. There's always lots of discussion (and concern) about how to teach traditional mathematical thinking to kids. But looking to the future, this pales in comparison to the importance of teaching computational thinking. Yes, there's a certain amount of traditional mathematical thinking that's needed in everyday life, and in many careers. But computational thinking is going to be needed everywhere. And doing it well is going to be a key to success in almost all future careers. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, whatever. The future of all these professions will be full of computational thinking. Whether it's sensor-based medicine, computational contracts, education analytics or computational agriculture---success is going to rely on being able to do computational thinking well. I've noticed an interesting trend. Pick any field X, from archeology to zoology. There either is now a "computational X" or there soon will be. And it's widely viewed as the future of the field.
Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: Civics

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.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: History

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.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Using the Wolfram Language in the Classroom: Chemistry

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.
Rob Morris, Education Product Analyst, Business Analysis
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.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
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