The Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Posted June 18th, 2007 by Mark Cubberley, Wright State University-Lake Campus
1 Comments | 1176 Page Views
From Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica—"the world's most powerful mathematical software system"—comes The Wolfram Demonstrations Project. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an "open-code resource that uses dynamic computation [i.e. Mathematica] to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields." Although Wolfram's most recent version of his computational software (Mathematica 6) is required to author, modify and publish Demonstration source code, web previews of the Demonstrations are available online. Alternatively, the free Mathematica Player allows anyone (with or without Mathematica 6) to "download a live version with active controls."There are currently over 1400 Demonstrations available on topics including the following: 3D Graphics, Calculus, Art, Physics, Elementary School Mathematics, Computers, Astronomy, Puzzles, Music Theory, Biology and Optical Illusions. A snapshot of a Demonstration, "Jazz Voicings" contributed by John Kiehl, is shown below. Interestingly, "every Demonstration undergoes a rigorous review process that checks for quality, clarity, and accuracy, so you can count them as academic publications."
How to cite this work
Mark Cubberley. "The Wolfram Demonstrations Project." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 22 November 2008. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.Bookmark/Search this post with:
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Re: The Wolfram Demonstrations Project
On June 21st, 2007 Michael Roy, Middlebury College said:
This is really interesting. It looks like the Adobe .pdf strategy. Give away content and a free player/viewer, and hope that this will encourage people to buy the authoring software. As I see it, the big issue is preservation and longevity. If one invests time and energy into creating learning objects using these tools, how long into the future can you count on the objects being usable? Are there tools for migrating to new platforms? Are there guarantees about future players playing older versions? And just how easy is it to author using these tools?
--mike
