They work quite well for me, with Cloud notebooks to take notes on and run code, shorter videos, many hands-on exercises and even a certificate to earn (who doesn’t love some micro-credentials?).
Now, I enjoyed the format and would love to see some different content, as I’m sure many of you would. What topics would you like to see?
Personally, I would love some more intermediate Wolfram Language skills courses. Such as a short Function-writing course, that goes into stuff like how to set options, how to set error messages etc.
I thought this might be a fun place to gather more ideas. Looking forward to reading yours in the comments.
I would really love to see some more maths-related courses. I really love the Calculus course, because I don’t use Wolfram Language much for maths and my knowledge of the area is pretty limited. It would be cool to see more like that - maybe some physics as well!
I would really like to see a series of three or four beginner/intermediate/advanced really challenging classes on the evaluation process and term rewriting that underlies the surface appearance of the Wolfram Language. Each of those classes should be difficult for students at that level and require substantial work by the student during and after the class with exercises to do and answers to compare their work against after they think they are finished. The result of each of those classes should raise the student’s skill to an entirely new level.
In the future when a user makes a mistake as a result of not understanding the evaluation process someone should direct them to the appropriate class and after the student works through that class they should understand exactly why what they had done was incorrect and how to do it correctly and how they will never make a mistake at that level again.
I am hoping that users will be amazed at how much they learned from putting in the work on these classes.
Complexity Science seems to be advancing frontiers in many conventional subjects. For example, network (graphs) have become important tools in chemistry, biology and sociology to name a few. Ergodic theory, Tsallis entropy and non-Gaussian statistics seem just as important. While it may be difficult to develop a curriculum, Thurner’s recent text, Complexity of Complex Systems, might provide a starting point.
A second suggestion related to the “physics” idea Carl mentioned… Squigglology. That’s what I call the study of how to interpret and repurpose a variety of notations found in physics texts. Wolfram Language treats many of these cogently, once you ‘break the code’. Tensor notation is a difficult but notable example.
Being lazy here and not searching for existing courses already, I suggests data analysis or introduction in Statistics (such as probabilities and distributions). Both will look great and will be informative with Wolfram language. I will start teaching them soon in first and second level of BSC, so if they are not here, I will create them myself
I love the certificates and exercises idea.
