Tag Archives: Wolfram Alpha

Teaching The Teachers: A Visit From Wolfram Research

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Wolfram research

Craig Bauling from Wolfram Research

Craig Bauling from Wolfram Research

This afternoon St Andrew’s College hosted Mr Craig Bauling from Wolfram Research as he gave a presentation to a number of teachers from the Canterbury Maths Association. The opportunity for this presentation came about after Craig had seen a post I had written in June 2014 entitled Wolfram Interactive Models Bring Learning To Life and distributed it amongst Wolfram employees. He also offered to present to interested teachers when he came to New Zealand in September. I reached out to Dean McKenzie (Head of Maths at St Andrew’s College) and Stephen McConnachie (eLearning Co-ordinator at Middleton Grange School) and together we managed to get this session promoted amongst Canterbury schools. Over twenty staff from different schools around Christchurch listened to Craig’s 2 hour presentation where he covered:

Mathematica:

This is a powerful desktop application that allows teachers and students to do a range of different things, including writing text books, creating and sitting assessment as well as making Powerpoint-like presentations. It utilises the power of the cloud based WolframAlpha to return some results / graphing abilities, and one of the key strengths is students can enter questions in “natural language.” The programme then interprets this and formats it into the correct syntax for Mathematica to complete the equation.

This makes it very easy to learn, and there are a number of “palettes” that guide teachers or students through the correct syntax of more advanced formulas. The state of Victoria, Australia, has provided Mathematica to students from Yr4 up in schools to help them across all curriculum areas, not just Maths (Craig said Physics and Chemistry are the biggest users of Mathematica, followed by Maths, but English and Social Sciences also make use of it).

Wolfram Alpha:

Demonstrating the power of Wolfram Alpha search

Demonstrating the power of Wolfram Alpha search

Possibly this was the one tool that most of the teachers attending had been exposed to before. Rather than functioning as a search engine like Google or Bing that traditionally return thousands of pages that might contain the answer to your search query, WolframAlpha tries to provide the actual answer to your question.

One of the examples given was “What is the boiling temperature of water on Mt Cook?” Pulling on information stored in the databases WolframAlpha has access to, it knows both the height/elevation of Mt Cook, and the scientific principle of how elevation affects boiling temperatures. It returned: boiling temperature What was neat to see was the results returned in the metric system – using Geo-IP technology, it knew we were in New Zealand and returned results accordingly.

Another fascinating example was the results returned to the esoteric question “What was the weather like on Keith Urban’s 24th birthday?” Again, drawing on the extensive meteorological information WolframAlpha has access to, it showed the results for Christchurch, New Zealand (again, recognising our location based on IP Address):

Wolfram Demonstrations:

These held quite a bit of appeal given they could easily be embedded into a school’s Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle or Ultranet – here is the video I created earlier showing how to do this:

Installation of CDF Plugin & Embedding Wolfram Demonstration Model into Moodle

The interactive nature of these models, where students can manipulate the input or data, make them perfect for embedding into a Moodle Forum or Assignment activity, allowing students to submit answers directly into Moodle without needing to use any other software.

What was reassuring was that all demonstration models are vetted for accuracy by staff at Wolfram, source code must be made available so teachers could modify the models if they wished to, and the model can be downloaded as a separate CDF file or embedded directly into a web page. Here are some examples of different Wolfram Demonstration Models:

Selection of Wolfram Demonstration Models

Members from the Canterbury Maths Association enjoy the presentation

Members from the Canterbury Maths Association enjoy the presentation

The feedback from the teachers that attended was very positive about the session and I am sure that many will go away and look at the free products and also evaluate whether licensed products are purchased for teaching staff and/or students.

Wolfram Interactive Models Bring Learning To Life

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I was recently reminded by Stephen McConnachie at Middleton Grange School of the excellent Wolfram Demonstration Models available online and I have explored the ability to embed these directly into Moodle, our Learning Management System.

These interactive models allow students and teachers to directly manipulate animations to increase understanding of complex ideas such as insulin molecular structure, radial engine design and how microwave ovens work. Wolfram Demonstrations uses CDF Technology (Computable Document Format) to deploy the interactive demonstrations to any standard web browser – a plugin approximately 230MB in size.

Once the plugin is installed, a user can manipulate the model directly within the browser as this video shows:

The full video above shows the three stages of using these demonstrations:

  1. The installation of the CDF plugin
  2. The obtaining of the embed code for the selected model from the Demonstrations page
  3. Inserting the embed code into Moodle (or any other page that supports iFrames)

The Wolfram Demonstrations pages were created to support Wolfram Mathematica users. Anyone wishing to create their own demonstration model must submit their examples to Wolfram Research where a full vetting for accuracy and completeness takes place.

So far, High School students, teachers, professors, researchers, lawyers and hobbyists have all submitted to the ~9600 examples. Below is a screenshot of some of the demonstrations:

Featured DemonstrationsThe other strong feature of Wolfram Demonstrations is the cross-curricular range of models as evidenced here:

Curriculum areas that have Wolfram Demonstration Models available.

Curriculum areas that have Wolfram Demonstration Models available.

These demonstrations represent an excellent additional resource that teachers can take advantage of, particularly when trying to aid student understanding of complex ideas. I will be promoting these to our staff and beyond for inclusion into Moodle courses within the College.

Bringing It All Together: The Power Of Embedding Content

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One of the common complaints I hear from teachers in schools where computers/tablets are common place in the classroom is that students are easily distracted when browsing websites they’ve been directed to by the teacher. One way to address this is by where ever possible, choosing content that can be embedded directly into your Learning Management System, which in our case is Moodle.

Prior to the introduction of Moodle at St Andrew’s College in 2012, a number of teaching staff had various blogs, wikis and websites around the internet where students would be directed to find content useful for their learning. One of the initial attractions of Moodle was that it would centralise the sharing of resources for all teachers and students, whilst still providing a convenient launching point to locate relevant content elsewhere on the internet.

Increasingly, however, content can now be embedded from the source provider directly into Moodle meaning students do not need to leave the Learning Management System at all which increases engagement and reduces the chance of distraction by clicking off to other websites.

When sourcing great eLearning content from around the internet, I immediately look to see if it allows sharing through embedding, and where it does I always promote this option to our staff rather than simply linking to an external website from Moodle.

Embedding YouTube

One of the most popular resources to embed into Moodle is YouTube video clips and I created a video tutorial for our staff showing them how to do this:

At St Andrew’s College we have a Staff PD area within our Moodle site, and I’ve embedded all our video tutorials into a section of this site so that our staff can follow along with screencast tutorials like the one above.

Embedding ETV

Another valuable video source is ETV which more of our staff are finding the benefits of:

(I mentioned ETV embedding in this earlier post explaining various Moodle functions too)

Embedding Twitter

I’ve been posting recently about the merits of Twitter for Staff Professional Development and increasingly I’m seeing interesting uses by teachers of Twitter in the classroom. One way to achieve this is to embed a twitter feed directly into Moodle – again, a video tutorial showing how to do this:

Having recently returned from the outstanding EduTech conference in Brisbane, the Twitter hashtag of #eduTECH continues to be very active and remains a good source of links and advice. Embedding this into Moodle, or indeed this blog, is achievable with minimal effort:

Increasingly, more and more content is capable of being shared through embedding which is great news for teachers wanting to make their Learning Management Systems more engaging and interactive. A colleague recently tipped me off to using Wolfram Alpha maths resources that can be embedded into Moodle and I’ve demonstrated this briefly here:

Embedding Wolfram Alpha

There are so many other tools that can be embedded such as FotoBabble, Padlet and not to forget Google Docs / Presentations and Office365 WebApps that also allow for sharing through embedding into Moodle or other Learning Management Systems.

Feel free to share other great online resources that can be embedded in the comments below.

In the end, you want your students focusing on the content you’ve selected for that particular part of a lesson and by embedding the content you’re making it easier for them to access the content and stay on task.