Thank Gerald! I've given this a skim and hopefully I can put something together this week.

Thanks Ruben—I've fixed this on our end and also fixed two dynamic interfaces that were broken in that lesson. These fixes will be available the next time notebooks are deployed.

There is a typo in final solution to Lesson 2 Exercise 4 (equation of the sphere); ...(x-3)^2... should be ...(y-3)^2...

In a lecture long past, lesson 4 on the dot product, in the section "dot product of 2 different vectors", I guess that the difference vector u-v points in the wrong direction in the 3D image, it points from u to v, and should point from v to u. In lesson 3 on vectors, in the section "vector subtraction", in the 2D image the vector difference u-v does point in the correct direction, from v to u.

Yes, they are "available" ;-)

Adding a bit to the file ...

Attachments:

Average Values o...pdf

Hello! Congratulations for this course! I'd like to know if the notebooks of classes are disponible.

Interesting. First, I think you should show the single-variable calculus average value problem first in a very narrow tank, then expand it to a fish bowl proper. You could provide beautiful visualizations of both problems and show how they're related.

I also was thinking from a MAKE context of a museum exhibit. Have physical 2-D and 3-D tanks, and have a head like a printer head on a 3D Printer. Allow the user to specify a function to lay out bits of sand in the tank; the head rapidly distributes the sand into the curves. Then ask the average value question. Then have the vibration plates shake the sand down until it's flat. Was the operator able to guess the height of the sand -- the mean value?

Have you run across MAKE:Calculus (and its sister books MAKE:Geometry and MAKE:Trigonometry)? These are from a couple of makers -- and a reformed rocket scientist -- who think that 3DP objects can have a huge impact for students to understand these subjects. I like their work -- I think anyone here would like it, too. There are 3 episodes in the Make:Cast podcast -- including a suspicious blank section in the discussion about the calculus book! What was said that was deleted? If you dig hard enough in the Internet Archive, you can find it.

I think a physical demonstration would be great. IMHO, physicality trumps animations.

Hi Phil—I recall Feynman using that, yes :). I can only say that we will look into trying to implement this functionality, but can't offer any promises. As for testers, it's basically us on the Wolfram U team testing all of this stuff out. Admittedly, I'm not sure that we considered the perspective of someone new with no local installation that wanted everything in one editable auto-saved notebook per exercise set. It might be that the difficulties I mentioned—and others that I did not—precluded that consideration, or it might be that I personally think that these lessons and exercises all work best locally. (It's hard to say after the fact.)

Hi Phil,

The problem with the separate scratch notebook is that it provides no way to store the student's work in context.

I agree with you. My solution is to copy/paste the exercises into notebooks on my desktop, and then program my solutions/answers into these. Keyboard shortcuts in the desktop version make programming so much faster and these are unavailable in the online framework. In the end, it's easier to retrieve my work on my device, organized to my liking.

For those without access to the desktop version, there is always the Wolfram Cloud: use a free account to create notebooks, save to the desktop, and access with the free Wolfram Player later. It wouldn't take much to have two browser tabs open in a vertically split screen, one with exercises or quizzes, and another with the Wolfram Cloud notebook.

Maybe one of these solutions could work for you. The second option is especially good because it makes every part of these study groups cost nothing to participants. It's so hard to beat.

hello, i am not seeing that at all; i only seem to be "getting" the same link to the community group or more recently a link regarding the course framework

Hi Tom—it's in the same place for all DSGs, at the top of the chat panel in a light cyan color. You can see it explicitly circled in red in the screenshot within this thread.

...and that's excluding any responsiveness issues that might arise from having users not only typing into notebooks with complex 3D graphics and Manipulates and so on, but trying to generate their own such objects and save them to their own cloud copies of the notebooks.

Auto-grader aside, the EIWL exercises run through a rather thorough repertoire of things in their course. I rapidly got in the habit of using the exercise window for scratch code, and I wasn't shy about how I used it. I thought it was a rocking good way to have all of the coursework in one place.

Wouldn't the hypothetical problems you describe also apply to the scratch notebook in the framework? How in general did the course designers intend for students to use the framework? Did they want everyone to do all their work in the framework? Were the beta testers able to do that?

Arben: I used to explain the Average Value Theorem with ant farms. Suppose the surface of sand in an ant farm (before ants are put in) is made to conform to a given function. The farm is set on a vibrating plate and the vibration turned on. The sand will gradually flatten out to a depth equal to the average value of the function. I would like to see an animation of that process that can be done for any given (reasonable) function.
Suppose instead that the sand is replaced by a fluid with the surface held in place by a piece of hard plastic conforming to the given function. If the plastic is suddenly removed, the fluid will settle to a level surface. Water would slosh around a lot, but the higher the viscosity, the less sloshing. Could you make an animation of that process for a given function and viscosity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscosity shows something along these lines.
Finally, extend both of these from two to three dimensions as in a fish tank with the surface conforming to a function z = f(x,y).

I wouldn't say much of anything is particularly easy to do in the framework :'). But I see what you mean and will ask the person who handles our cloud deployment whether this is possible.

Hi Juan—yes, there's clearly an issue with this question. I'll modify it such that it makes sense and have it redeployed.

Hi Phil—in order:

1. Unlike the simple exercises in EIWL, there is—unfortunate as it may be—a 0% chance that we (or anybody, I think) could write code that would appropriately grade solutions to this type/level of exercise. In some cases, there is a strict numeric answer that could be entered and checked, but I don't think it makes sense to have an "enter your input here" only for some portion of the exercises. You can still work on the exercises in the scratch cloud notebook that you have available in the interface simultaneously with the exercises. I do, however, think that the lesson and exercise notebooks are best interacted with locally—we've made serious improvements to cloud such that it's even possible to host and interact with lots of the graphics and interfaces here, but when it comes down to it these are generally heavy notebooks and a local interface is always going to handle them noticeably better than a cloud interface.

2. They are indeed being worked on, but are not yet ready. The transcripts are actually done by a person!

3. All of the lesson and exercise notebooks are deployed to the beta course and should be in working order. The review notebooks are written as we go through the DSG in response to the questions people submit at the end-of-session surveys and are "DSG-exclusive", so to speak, on account of needing that context.

Several questions about the beta framework for the course:

1. When we do exercises in the framework, where should students be showing/storing our work? In the Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language (EIWL) interactive course -- something that seems rather similar -- each chapter's exercise was a scratch Notebook proper that allowed (actually, required) the entering of WL code to answer the exercises. In this course, the exercise pages don't appear to be interactive Notebooks; I don't see any mechanism for entering any text into the "exercises" notebook in this framework. Unless I'm missing something, the only alternative seems to be to download the exercises notebook and work with the Notebook in my standalone Mathematica app. This seems to defeat the advantages of the entire interactive framework for working through the course; students that are familiar with the EIWL framework will be confused by this interactive course.

2. Will transcripts be provided of the sessions? EIWL provided a "transcripts" tab with a transcript of the presentation (I presume that transcript was generated with one of the transcript-generating AIs out there). This was highly useful in that course; students here (and future students using this interactive course) would benefit from having those transcripts.

3. Now that the interactive course beta has been published, what Notebooks that have been provided via the notebook code dump are not part of that course? AFAICT, the only Notebook which is only provided in the download code blob is the Week 1 review notebooks -- one Notebook so far. Is this a correct presumption: are all the other notebooks of this course included in the online course beta?

You're welcome! I'm glad you like it. If you modify the plot range a little bit, you could do this for any space curve you have in mind. Maybe I'll modify it to just accept an argument specifying the plot range so that other folks can play with this.

Thank you Arben. Perhaps join was for the conditions, and intersection is better for regions.

Dear Arben:

Thanks a lot for all your work. I truly appreciate it over many courses and webinars.

On Lesson 12, Exercise 5, what does it mean "join those regions together?"

Best, Juan Ariel

Hi Phil—please see attached :)

Indeed, this is what I'm seeing here:

That's surprising to me—I've entered the preview room for tomorrow's lecture and the link is already pre-populated. I recall seeing a sticky link there in today's class, though I didn't need to click it (for obvious reasons). That link should be pre-populated for the entire study group series, so I don't see any reason that it shouldn't have been there on Friday or today. Also, that link works when I'm fully logged out and in incognito mode, so there should be no permissions issues.

I'll keep an eye out tomorrow, but something seems fishy!

If you have the link, you should be able to access it. You should get the link in your reminder emails each day, and it's of course put up in the chat during each course. If the link isn't working for you, please email us (with the link) at wolfram-u at wolfram dot com and we'll figure out what's going on.

Carl, if you download the latest versions of the notebooks on Amoeba, do you still have this issue?

Indeed :). I believe the exercise notebooks which will be deployed to the full course framework will have this change made when the course goes live.

One of my wife’s favorite shrubs is a spiral cypress or boxwood topiary. I found pictures of a couple and used them to estimate curves that would approximate their shapes. I think a curve something like this would make a more satisfying animation of an osculating sphere moving along its curve than would a helix where the osculating sphere would not change size.

Online References: (1) https://mathworld.wolfram.com/OsculatingSphere.html (2) Osculating Spheres of Space Curves - Brown University → https://www.math.brown.edu/tbanchof/balt/ma106/lab4.html?dtext46.html

DG Textbook References: (3) E. Kreyszig, “Differential Geometry”, Dover (1991) pp. 54-55; (4) R.S. Millman, G.D. Parker, "Elements of differential geometry", Prentice-Hall (1979) pp. 39; (5) D.J. Struik, "Lectures on classical differential geometry", Dover (1988) pp. 25

Video: (6) Osculating Plane, Circle, and Sphere for a Space Curve → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08C4U8x8F04

In the Lesson 10 exercises notebook in Exercise 2 I notice the word problem states a function of cosines, whereas the solution uses a function of sines.

Regards, John Burgers.

Thanks John—fixed on our side.

Arben, As I suggested in the Q & A, I would like to see an osculating sphere added to the 3D graph under the Unit Binormal Vector section. Does the osculating sphere contain the osculating circle? Do they have the same radius?

He's just kidding with me!

Thanks for your feedback, Lori. I'll talk to the team about perhaps uploading and deploying these notebooks with the Solutions cells collapsed by default.

Hi Carl—it should be there now. Not sure why it was late; there can be a little variability with BigMarker on occasion.

This isn't a problem, I just thought it was hilarious. Before I evaluated the code in one of the lesson notebooks, this was the error:

It would be funny if "graphicsStuff" actually became a thing!

I am looking for the recording from today's (9/13) class but it's not in my in-basket. Has it been released?

Carl

Hi Arben,

Happy to be taking part in another study group!

ISSUES:

a. I'm running 13.3.0. on OS X. When the magnification is increased from 50% to 75% or 100%, this error is generated: The magnification does actually increase and the notebook functions fine, it's just annoying.

b. Are the "Solution" cells meant to be set to "open" in the exercise files? This happens with the updated files and I did refresh the files page before re-downloading the files.

There were some errors that were fixed in the update, so that was nice!

Any help would be appreciated.

Lori

Thanks Carl. I believe we've found the issue and will be pushing out an update.

Two installations on different OSes is very strange indeed. I've had someone check in 12.3 on Windows 11 and it worked for them, at least. Could you try changing the magnification and letting me know what happens? Simple idea, I know, but I'm curious.

Michael, I might have to direct you to our tech support, but I'm curious whether this happens with the other notebooks as well. You say "files"; does that mean that the other lessons so far have all opened like this? Do the later notebooks do the same?

Hopefully we can work this out!

Holy moly! I'll ask internally about this.

Hi, Michael. I'm running Mathematica 12.2, and I'm having no problem using the notebooks of this course. I've never having any issue downloading/running notebooks from Wolfram Research. I suspect your problem is not related to the version of Mathematica you're running.

I do get "Why the bleep" warnings -- a warning that I'm running an earlier version of Mathematica that the notebooks were saved in. I just ignore that error and use the notebook:

Hello! I currently use Mathematica 12. The .nb files open in 12 but they are not looking good/useful. Any way to fix this aside from upgrading straight away?

As Hahn said, I, too, have some volunteer commitments at the same time, and I will rely on the recordings when I miss the live classes.

I'm glad that you think so, Carl! I think the addition of the exercises will round things out and help you to start making beautiful visualizations like you see in the course on your own. (Though of course, basically every visualization in both the lessons and exercises has its code included in the notebook, and that alone is very useful!)

Thanks Aurelius! I've fixed this in my local copy and replaced it in our (perhaps temporary) updated materials link which I'll post in this thread.

Re: the discussion of handedness in Monday's presentation, the handedness of physical objects is one of my favorite science topics. Physics/engineering students are aware of the use of the right-hand rule to visualize moving charged particles, current in a wire, and the associated magnetic fields. Handedness also plays a huge role in chemistry. Flipping the handedness of every molecule and structure in the human body would have a huge impact on the function of the human. Roger Zelazny speculates about such a flipping in a delightful little novel Doorways in the Sand. The quick read may be at a local library, or it could even be found online as a PDF.

CJD in the 1980s was related to wrong-handed molecules altering the structure of proteins in the brain; the Red Cross used to have screening questions about "Mad Cow Disease". Fortunately, this disease appears to have disappeared.

Turnbuckles have left-handed threading on one end of the bolt and right-handed threading on the other end. There must be distinct nuts with the two threadings to secure the tension. Polymath and tensegrity-maker Gerald de Jong has created a Turnbuckle Tensegrity: he figured out how to 3DP struts and nuts with both threadings. Gerald mentioned this model on social media, but he hasn't published anything about it on his website yet. Almost all turnbucles used in the world (e.g., screen door diagonal lines, container ship lashings, etc.) are at tension. Gerald's tensegrity-struts are in compression. Only those who pay excessive attention to turnbuckles would notice this structural pun.

The most famous left-hand screw is MIT's Big Screw award a penny-a-vote contest awarded to an instructor who did some "bad" thing to his/her/their students in the spring term. It is a massive screw with left-hand threading. The story of this winner is here):

Math Professor AP Mattuck apparently won the award twice; I know nothing about the circumstances. Perhaps he was teaching multivariable calculus one of those times...

It's no problem at all! You will receive recordings of each day's lectures and will—later in the study group—have early access to the course framework, i.e. videos + lesson notebooks + quizzes + exercises.

Hi everybody! This study group starts this coming Monday, so I wanted to bump this post as a reminder. See you soon!