Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition is a great tool for students to use on their own computers. And you can access it using natural language, and work with it directly in a notebook: But-using the capabilities of the Wolfram Knowledgebase-it can also involve a vast range of real-world data, whether about countries, chemicals, words or artworks. The content can involve pure calculations or visualizations. With Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition it’s very easy to create compelling content. You can ask for Demonstrations using natural language, or you can just browse the Demonstrations Project website, select a Demonstration, copy it into your Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition notebook, and then immediately use it there: And in Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition students (and teachers!) can build all sorts of dynamic visualizations just using natural language:īut what if you want some more sophisticated interactive demonstration, that might be hard to specify? Well, Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition has direct access to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, which contains over 12,000 Demonstrations. Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition also supports dynamic interactive visualizations-for example using the Wolfram Language Manipulate function. But teachers can also set up templates for visualizations, and let students fill in their own functions or data to explore for themselves. Often students will just ask for the visualizations themselves. It’s very common to use Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition to create visualizations of concepts. Or make a notebook defining an assignment or a test-then let the students fill in their work (and grade it right there in the notebook). Describe a concept in a notebook, then let students explore by doing their own computations right there in the notebook. In Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition, notebooks are also a great medium for teachers to provide material to students. And they’re not just something to produce for an assignment: they’re active computable documents that students can keep and use at any time in the future.īut students aren’t the only ones to produce notebooks. Computational essays can also provide a great showcase of student achievement, as well as a means of assessing student understanding. The process of creating a computational essay is a great way for students to engage with material they’re studying. A computational essay has both text and computation-combined to build up a narrative to which both human and computer contribute. So students can use them not just to do their computations, but also to keep notes, and to explain the computations they’re doing, or the results they get:Īnd in fact, Wolfram Notebooks enable a whole new kind of student work: computational essays. They can also contain text and structure. And then save your work in the notebook, to continue-or review what you did-another time.īut notebooks aren’t just for storing computations. And then-right there in the notebook-see how all your steps fit together to give your final results. Because by being able to work through things in a sequence of steps, students get to really engage with the computations they’re doing. But it’s the use of the notebook environment that makes it so uniquely valuable for education. Instead, everything is in a Wolfram Notebook, where you can save and use previous results, and build up or work through a whole computation:īeing able to use Wolfram|Alpha-style free-form input is what opens Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition up to the full range of students. But now you’re not just getting a one-shot answer. ![]() Just type input the way you would in Wolfram|Alpha. It’s built on a huge tower of technology, but what it does is to let any student-without learning any syntax or reading any documentation- immediately build up or work through computations. Well, that’s what we’ve done in Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition. It’s also how generations of higher-level students have been taught.īut what about students who aren’t ready to use Mathematica yet? What if we could take the power of Mathematica (and what’s now the Wolfram Language), but combine it with the ease of Wolfram|Alpha? And for more than 30 years that’s how countless inventions and discoveries have been made around the world. It’s incredibly useful-especially when coupled with its step-by-step solution capabilities.īut what if one doesn’t want just a one-shot answer? What if one wants to build up (or work through) a whole computation? Well, that’s what we created Mathematica and its whole notebook interface to do. But it’s a one-shot process: a student enters the question they want to ask ( say in math) and Wolfram|Alpha gives them the (usually richly contextualized) answer. Whether in college or high school, Wolfram|Alpha has become a ubiquitous way for students to get answers. Wolfram|Alpha has been a huge hit with students.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |