Bring Ideas to Life with Wolfram Demonstrations Project

New Semester

How is the new semester going? We hope that you are enjoying teaching the new student cohorts this semester. Have you ever seen them using a search engine called WolframAlpha other than Google? It is quite interesting as when searching for academic knowledge, it gives a set of related contents with equations and diagrams if applicable. It is quite handy and is popular among college students.

Wolfram Demonstrations Projects

The same company developed WolframApha and the famous Mathematica also created the Wolfram Demonstration Project to bring ideas to life. The project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.

The following video is a demo of the daylight calculator in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. With this demonstration, teachers can use it to explain the concepts in a much more visualised approach. It also allows students to play with it to have a better understanding of the concept and master the calculation.

What is good?

What is so good about it? Let's count:

1. It brings ideas to life with its interactive and visualised features. 
2. Now it has 11317 interactive demonstrations covering topics over math, physical sciences, life science, business & social system, system & model, engineering & technology,  arts & humanities, and kids & gaming.
3. It is an open source system and hundreds if not thousands of authors have contributed to the demonstrations project.
4. It is free for any teacher or student to use.
5. You can embed that into your Moodle unit

Hey, it sounds really good. How about taking a look and playing with some examples by yourselves? Download and install the free Wolfram CDF Player. Try Consumer Choice: Income, Taste, and Prices or Radial Engine with the Internet Explorer (When we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox)

What is not so good?

It works quite nice independently with the desktop application. It also means that it could be difficult to integrate the demonstrations into LMS or Powerpoint. Even though it works fine with Internet Explorer when we tested it, it had issues when running in more popular Chrome and Firefox.

What's in it for us?

Using the interactive visualisation of the concepts in nearly any topic in the business school. As the teacher or the student move a Demonstration's control, they can see a change in its output that helps the students to understand the concepts.

And the good thing is that we don't need to do anything but just find one Demonstration to use. You can either browse the categories to explore topics or simply search the concepts. There are plenty of Demonstrations waiting for you to explore.

 

If you are interested, give it a try. We think that it could be quite useful if it happens that someone has contributed the Demonstrations that we are planning to use in our teaching. It can be a good learning experience for the students. You can find the frequently asked questions on this page.