Field Trip to Wolfram Research
November 3rd, 2008
October was a busy month (I was out of town 3 out of 4 weekends), so now I’m catching up. One of my trips was to the Mathematica User Conference in Champaign, Illinois. While I was there I got a tour of Wolfram Research. Like other tech companies I’ve visited, they also have a “creativity” room – this one included comfy chairs, a wooden periodic table (with elements in the compartments), a pendulum that hangs over a sand pit. I wish we’d get “creativity” (play) room at our college!
I haven’t been a hard-core Mathematica user, but I’ve been extremely intrigued with the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, and how we can use the demos in our classes. This is tricky, because the demos were never really intended to be anything other than demos. Demonstrations are created by Mathematica users who build the demos because thay are fun or interesting. This user-generated content is growing at a phenominal rate – sometime this week Wolfram should be adding the 4,000th demonstration. There was this great video playing outside the exhibit hall/snack room that showcased a variety of Wolfram Demonstrations.
My presentation was about online calculus and how I am trying to use Wolfram Demonstrations as a teaching tool in this course. Since the demos are not designed for teaching purposes, I often find myself wishing for a slightly different version of a demonstration, but I haven’t been talented enough to create my own (yet). The trickiest part about using the demos is assessing whether the student learned something from going to the demonstration. Sometimes I have students perform some specific task with the demonstration and then use Jing to record an image of the final version. That works okay for some, but it isn’t ideal. So the focus of my talk was to push specifically creating Wolfram Demonstrations for teaching and learning purposes.
We saw a beta of Mathematica 7 at the conference, but because of NDA, I can’t really say anything about it. I am really looking forward to telling you about it’s new features as soon as it is officially released!
Possibly Related Posts:
- TED Talk on Wolfram Alpha
- Wolfram Alpha for Inquiry Based Learning in Calculus
- My Interview at Wolfram Alpha HomeworkDay
- Wolfram|Alpha: Recalculating Teaching & Learning
- What we’re doing with Wolfram|Alpha
Posted in Wolfram Tech
Hi Maria
I am so jealous! I tried everything I could to get funding for that conference but to no avail – it would have been good to finally meet you.
Regarding educational use of the demos – in my opinion one limitation is the fact that you can’t put arbitrary text fields in a standard Wolfram Demonstration. This is down to (intentional) limitations in Mathematica Player.
Of course, if you have fully licensed versions of Mathematica then you can (usually) easily get around this problem and just modify a demo to use textboxes instead of sliders or buttons.
As always, I am happy to try and make any modifications for you so feel free to drop me an email and ask for what you need. If I can’t do it myself I might be able to press gang someone else
Best Wishes,
Mike