Hi Lori—yes, if you could please email wolfram-u at wolfram dot com (very effective spam filter technique here, I'm sure) about this, that would be helpful. I can't quite see how this is happening, so more info would be good. Thanks!

This is corrected on our end; it may just not be deployed to the framework yet.

Agreed - I was just about to post the same bug

Thank you! Yes, you should be able to download them from the framework we shared or directly from the amoeba link that we pin/sticky every day.

Hi Arben!

I have refreshed the page hoping this would be fixed but, no. The scratch notebook obscures the middle panel. It happens in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. It does not happen with quizzes, only Practice Problems.

Examples: Chrome Safari Firefox

Please let me know if you need more information! Thank you!

Arben: Okay, let’s forget about any physical interpretation. Please read the attached pdf.

Attachments:

Average Values o...pdf

all good, thanks for taking the time with the explanation

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.

The "for you" is not my focus. I'm asking how a Man from Mars would use the course and work the exercises. How would someone relatively new to the Mathematica app, the Wolfram Cloud, etc., figure out how to use the tools. If the framework is designed so that a [relative] newbie can work the course, it will be just fine for me.

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.

Alternatively, I could work in the scratch notebook in the framework and save that notebook to my Cloud account. I hadn't thought about archiving the scratch-area that way. That is my point: some newbie -- some Man from Mars -- is not going to figure out how to do that in the course. To have a fighting chance, the framework would have to support it. That's why I was curious what the internal beta-testers speculated/noted on how students would manage the workflow of the exercises and quizzes.

As an aside, the "Man from Mars" reference is from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961): a person who grew up on Mars absent from any humans returns as an adult to Earth; he is completely disoriented by many things he sees. The question of how a Man from Mars would cope with something was an idiom in certain circles for many years; I suspect that has waned in recent years, but it seemed perfect in this context.

@tom pearce , e-mails from the "Wolfram U Team" should have the URL of the code blob. I just verified: the e-mail sent at 11AM EDT this (Thursday) morning definitely has the link the code blob. I recommend keeping all e-mails from the "Wolfram U Team" in your e-mail archive.

The e-mail sent out at 5:34 PM EDT today (Thursday) noting that today's video was available for viewing has the URL for the beta version of the interactive framework for the course. All videos and exercises are accessible from that.

I believe that each e-mail from "Wolfram U Team" should have both of these URLs, but each e-mail today was missing one of the links. The links do not change; once you have both of them, you should be fine.

The links that Arben mentioned in the BigMarker presentation are only viewable (and accessible) during the live presentation of the course. AFAICT, they are not available in the replay of the course. But you should be good if you kept the e-mails from "Wolfram U Team" today. That should get you running tonight.

Gerald—this is a very nice way to demonstrate the idea. Unfortunately, I think developing such a simulation is a bit beyond the scope of this course (though if I knew how to do it mostly off the top of my head, I would admittedly still do it).

i have yet to see the download link for the code blob

You noted: that the difficulty in imitating what the EIWL course did was auto-grading. Don't auto-grade. Simply providing an interpreter in the exercises window should be easy.

Right, I said that doing auto-grading for something like this was impossible—but that's not to say that tasks simpler than that are trivial or even easy to accomplish; they're two orthogonal statements, so to speak. It's just that the auto-grading in particular is rather impossible; other notebook deployment possibilities which are sub-impossible can still span the range between "we'll trivially do that ASAP" and "that's a lot of work." Adding interactive portions to complex notebooks which auto-save, live, per-account and per-lesson, then are shown to each respective user each time seems like it falls closer to the latter to me—it would require modifying the framework such that the exercises aren't static notebooks, but auto-saving notebooks which display on a per-account basis.

...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. Then we have to worry about users making these objects in these notebooks but not making them in a way that runs well on cloud, and the support tickets that would be generated from people who have barely-functional things in their notebooks... I just mean to say that there are a lot of moving parts here that may not be fully visible to the end user. (Which is as it should be, but it's worth keeping in mind when imagining that something might be easy to implement!)

How are the course designers visualizing that students work through the examples in the framework? How did beta testers using the framework go through the examples? If the "scratch" window in the framework is like other interactive courses, I don't see how it can be used to take notes and create a record of working through the problems. What did the beta testers find -- how did they work through this in the framework? How did they use the scratch notebook? Were they able to save their work?

I wouldn't say much of anything is particularly easy to do in the framework :').

You noted: that the difficulty in imitating what the EIWL course did was auto-grading. Don't auto-grade. Simply providing an interpreter in the exercises window should be easy.

I just can't quite visualize how we're supposed to generate organized notes as we work through the exercises. I don't see how this course framework provides any way to do that. That's why I'm curious how the beta testers used the framework in their testing. Working through the course in a standalone Mathematica notebooks isn't bad, but it doesn't seem to gybe with the intent of an interactive course. To use a metaphor, it's a bit of an impedance mismatch.

Thanks for the eagle-eyed catch, Juan—I've updated the notebook on our side. I'll look into your question about the quiz after today's session as well.

Dear Arben:

There might by a typo on Problem 1,part 2, Lesson 17: g_{xx} is repeated.

Hello Arben:

About Problem 4 on Quiz 3, are there more than one correct answer?

You're welcome, of course! Maybe that's how I had intended it, but your comment made me realize that it was a bit unclear, so I'm glad that I could update it.

Hi Juan—thank you for your kind comments. In that exercise, the idea is that the function is a product of one function of x and y and another function of z. This means that you can find where the whole function is continuous in the x-y plane by looking at that first function, find out where it's continuous "out of the plane" (i.e. where z != 0) by looking at the second function, and then find the full 3D region where the whole function is continuous by taking the intersection of these two regions. ("Join" is a little imprecise there, I agree. I will update the notebook now to specify "intersection".)

For example, imagine a situation where f(x,y,z) = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 - 1) ln(1-z).

• You can say that g(x,y) = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 - 1) and h(z) = ln(1-z), so that f(x,y,z) = g(x,y) h(z).
• g(x,y) is continuous as long as its argument is non-negative, so you need that x^2 + y^2 - 1 ≥ 0, or x^2 + y^2 ≥ 1. This corresponds to the whole plane with the unit circle centered at the origin cut out.
• h(z) is continous as long as its argument is positive, so you need 1 - z > 0, or z < 1.
• In total, f(x,y,z) must be continuous only where x^2 + y^2 ≥ 1 and z < 1 at the same time. That looks like:

Here's the long answer: "We used to explicitly post the URL for the download materials and the community forum URL in the Chat panel. We have changed this: while we still explicitly note the URL of the community forum, we now place the DOWNLOAD link behind a label. There are good reasons for this change! Sorry for any confusion this change may have caused." :)

@Arben Kalziqi , here's a screenshot 3 minutes before the course is scheduled to start today, September 19, 2023:

The community forum link is noted, but there is no link for the download blob. Something is unhappy in the workflow....

Arben, It is Fabulous! Thank you so much for your efforts on this!

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,

The link to the downloadable code blob should be put up in the chat every day, but it hasn't been posted in the BigMarker chat panel the past 2 days. The only thing posted on the chat page was a link to this discussion page. I don't need the URL, but I noticed that the download URL was missing. I posted a note that it was missing in the BigMarker comments area that pop up after the session. The link for the data blog has been regularly included in the reminder e-mails before the session, and the e-mails noting that each video is available for download.

never mind thanks, i found the folder, i just can't access it 8-(

hello arben, i'm admittedly a little late to the course and trying to catch up, can you please (re)share the link to the course material folder? thanks, tom

Thanks for this example, Gerald—it was a fun little exercise. It ain't the prettiest thing, but here it is—feel free to ask me if you have any questions about how anything works or why I did any particular thing in any particular way.

You may have to download the notebook to see the actual visualizaiton; it's a little heavy to run on an embedded cloud notebook, I suspect.

Copious thanks! That you considered this perspective makes this educator beyond happy for all the future nerds who enjoy stretching their brains [triple happy face+nerd emojis]

Excellent, thank you. I'll have a look at this and hopefully have some code for you on Monday.

Thanks John—this is also fixed now.

Hi Gerald—could I get confirmation on whether the osculating sphere is just the sphere with the same radius as the osculating circle? Documentation on this seems a little sparse/mixed. (If it isn't, do you have a particular reference which jives with your understanding of it?)

Hello,

I notice on Exercise 1 in the notebook Lesson 8 Exercises.nb the first entry is 1/(x-1) instead of 1/(t-1)

Regards, John Burgers

Cool, thanks, Arben! [star eyes emoji]

(this message board does not like emojis)

Coming in Wolfram Language v14.0: graphicsStuff!

Are you testing us? That would have to be big-g GraphicsStuff. :)

Thanks Thomas; this is fixed in the latest version of the exercises.

Coming in Wolfram Language v14.0: graphicsStuff!

(This should be fixed in the currently-uploaded version.)

Hi Arben!

Thanks for the reply! You didn't have to be late to the study group replying to my comment!

Keep this in mind: open solution cells deny us the satisfaction of testing our recall for some, and for others, practicing new skills. Learning can't be an enjoyable challenge if the answers are so easily accessible. There's a reason the answers in textbooks are in the back.

Your "secret" 'select multiple things' tip should be helpful to one or two people!

Will submit any more issues later.

Hi Lori—I actually have been getting your first problem myself and had assumed that it was just something in my installation as I have a custom magnification set! Interesting; I'll look into this. And yes, the solution cells for the exercises are meant to be open. You are of course free to try them yourself first.

A little secret useful thing is that if you hold—on a Mac, at least—Option while clicking a cell bracket, it'll select all cells of that type. So you can hold opt, click the cell bracket for any Solution cell, then right click the cell and click "close all subgroups". It will then collapse all of the Solution cells.

Yes--I thought about the magnification too. Changing that did not make a difference.

I tried opening the files in Mathematica 11.2 and 10.0 on my PC and in both cases I just got an empty window. Correct file title, but nothing to see. I am working off my MAC with a current version of 13.3 and that opens fine.

Thanks for the follow-up. I tested out a bunch of the lessons and they all open that way---the words are vertical. I wonder if there's a simple setting I can adjust to view them as intended....

By the way, I tried on both Windows 10 and MacOs 11.7.8 (two different computers) and had the same result.

In Lesson 5 Exercises, Exercise 3, Point C should be be {5,2} to complete the parallelogram. Doesn't affect the rest of the calculations since it is not used in the calculations.

The text is vertical. See the pic.

Hi Michael. Could you give me an example of what you're seeing? I think that most things should work well enough in 12, but I don't have a copy installed currently.

No problem, Charles. I think as a fellow physicist, you'll find a lot to appreciate here.

Hi everybody,

We're hoping to get the permissions issue with our file-sharing service worked out by the end of the day today. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that we've had to go pretty high up in the IT chain on this one.

In the meantime, you can find all of the Lesson and Exercise notebooks at this new link.

See you tomorrow!

EDIT: We've fixed the issue and now the original link should have all of the Lesson and Exercise notebooks—including Aurelius' catch on an early exercise—should be available via the original link. I've thus updated the link above back to the original link.

Phil—I'd heard about CJD in this context but the rest of this was news to me! Very amusing and interesting :).

Trivial, but there is a typo in Lesson 3, Exercise 3:

vec1 = {4, 4 - 1};

should be

vec1 = {4, 4, -1};

which requires one change further down:

Graphics[{Red, Arrow[{{0, 0}, vec1}], Blue, 
  Arrow[{{0, 0}, unitVec1}]}]

should be:

Graphics3D[{Red, Arrow[{{0, 0, 0}, vec1}], Blue, 
  Arrow[{{0, 0, 0}, unitVec1}]}]

I am looking fwd to this class. I've previewed some of the Notebooks and they are awesome. Both for the Calculus and the beautiful examples of Mathematica code. As Gleison said, I too have work commitments at the same time, but I will be catching the recordings when I miss the live classes.

Hi Arben, Thank you for making this introduction to multi-variable classes. I will try my best to attend all classes, but due to work commitments, I am not certain it will always be possible. I hope this is not a problem. I am looking forward to diving deep into the subject matter and making the most of the learning opportunities provided. My best regards, Gleison