Message Boards Message Boards

Tech-Based Teaching: a blog about edtech in the K-12 classroom

Posted 7 years ago

Hello! I'm the editor of Tech-Based Teaching, the educational technology blog sponsored by Wolfram Research. We are looking for new authors for the blog. If you’re passionate about using education technology in the classroom, especially in K-12, I would love to hear from you about your cool projects, lesson plans, and more!

POSTED BY: Alyson Gamble
5 Replies

I'm quite interested in the topic but unforuately after looking at the page most of the posts seemed to be focused on lesson planning but I write more about policy. However, your last post "Computational Thinking in the Classroom" is more aligned with the type of subject matter I'm interested in and have contacts in the field who might be interested in contributing as well.

POSTED BY: Blair Birdsell

Hello Alyson,

I have been using Wolfram Technology in my classroom and have been a speaker at various conferences for Wolfram Language and Classroom learning . feel free to contact me.

Regards Abhijeet Gawande

POSTED BY: Abhijeet Gawande

I am a high school math teacher that has recently started to use Mathematica. I am using it in my Mathematical Modeling (MM) course and would like to be able to expand it into my AP courses eventually. I have limited ability with Mathematica and would love any help in teaching my students the language. The progress has been much slower than I would like. The MM students are using math they have learned in high school to find solutions to more ambiguous problems. Students research information and work in small groups finding solutions to these problems. We use the SIAM M3Challenge (https://m3challenge.siam.org/) model and APA style writing for our papers. This year and last year we have so far looked into small ideas like: Can King Kong exist? (COMAP exercise), Are the Olympics a good city/national investment to host? How is the Opiad epidemic affecting us and what is the cost to the tax payer for solutions?; Determine the statistics in a sport and player position, then create a new statistic to find the best five players and apply to our local high school to determine our best players. Eventually the students will have a capstone project that requires them to research a topic in a career of interest. They are to work with a mentor and report their findings. I would also like to have them add to Wolfram Demonstrations at some point.

So far the students have only written one paper using Mathematica. They have found it difficult compared to Word or Google Docs. The math we have used has not really needed the power of Mathematica. It has been years since I have programmed and I am having difficulty teaching the language skills and the putting together of programming lines. Fortunately, I have some pretty adept kids. We are using "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" but it doesn't really help us put together thinking through a set of instructions for a particular task. It would be great to have a resource that teaches beginning code along with a particular question/math concept. Are there any particular groups of people that students can reach out to for help? We have desktop license and cloud license. We use Chromebooks in a 1-to-1 school and found issues with the system. The desktops work fine. The cloud edition on Chromebook is much more restrictive than the desktop. For instance, we don't have access to the palettes in cloud for writing purposes. The students miss the ability to simultaneously write on a team document that Google allows. We had issues with viewing Wolfram Demonstrations for a long time, but can now see them while using the desktops. The CDF Player was not working for us. Some of the issues are because of our firewalls, etc.

POSTED BY: Derek Straiton

We are using "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" but it doesn't really help us put together thinking through a set of instructions for a particular task. It would be great to have a resource that teaches beginning code along with a particular question/math concept.

Take a look at Bill Turkel's open-access textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica and the associated syllabi and course materials (notebooks, exercises etc.): Digital Research Methods with Mathematica and Introduction to Digital History. They're targeted at undergraduates but should be accessible to high-school students as well.

For a more advanced, largely math oriented (but still introductory) textbook take a look at Wellin's Programming with Mathematica. Unfortunately, it's not cheap.

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse

Thank you. I will look at these resources. Have a great day.

POSTED BY: Derek Straiton
Reply to this discussion
Community posts can be styled and formatted using the Markdown syntax.
Reply Preview
Attachments
Remove
or Discard

Group Abstract Group Abstract