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Learning Mathematica with neat projects

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg118417] Learning Mathematica with neat projects
  • From: Sol Lederman <sol.lederman at gmail.com>
  • Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:39:48 -0400 (EDT)

Hello, Everyone.

I want to thank each of you who has shown me simple and clever ways to use
Mathematica with my dots and lines projects. As a programmer for over 30
years I'm humbled at how challenging this stuff can be and very grateful to
those of you who have reached out to help me to start getting my bearings.

You might be interested to know that there's a bigger picture to what I'm
trying to do than just learn Mathematica for my own edification. I've been a
math blogger for 3 1/2 years at WildAboutMath.com. I've also led a number of
hands-on math circles with adults and kids and I enjoy leading students to
having Aha! experiences of enjoying and really understanding the foundations
of math. I'm shifting my focus from Wild About Math! to a new blog,
PlayingWithMathematica.com, where I can help folks who enjoy Math but who
are new to Mathematica to have Aha! experiences. I'm aiming to create
notebooks that kids (and anyone) can use to learn Mathematica and to play
with mathematical ideas in the context of developing neat projects.

I've developed one notebook so far, at
http://playingwithmathematica.com/notebooks/. (For some reason I can't
explain, you can't just click on the "curve stitch" link on the index page
because it just shows the notebook source in the browser. So, you have to
download the notebook and then open it. This first notebook is a good
illustration of how I aim to guide students in math + Mathematica + neat
projects. (I do plan to clean up the layout and style of the notebook and of
the writing a bit before promoting it.)

Before I can create a bunch of these educational notebooks I've got the
steep learning curve to overcome. I've been reading lots of documentation
and playing with Mathematica quite a bit and what I'm finding is that most
of the Mathematica documentation (including source code from the
demonstrations) is either so specific that I can't see how to use it outside
of the context of the very specific example or, in the case of the
demonstrations, is incomprehensible to beginners like me.

What I'm realizing is that I'd love to collaborate with Mathematica experts
in this group to get help in coding some applications for the Playing with
Mathematica site. Wolfram is aware of what I'm doing, they donated a license
to me for this project and they blessed the use of "Mathematica" in the URL.
I would still write the explanatory material and every collaborator would be
acknowledged on the site and in every notebook that he or she made
significant contributions to.

I have lots of ideas for interesting projects but not the skill (right now)
to implement them. The next project I'd like to do is a Galton board as
illustrated here: http://www.ms.uky.edu/~mai/java/stat/GaltonMachine.html.
(The disks exercise is a way of warming up to the project.) Yes, there
already exist Galton board demos in Mathematica but I like this particular
style. The challenge is not just to code the design but to code it in such a
way that uses simple Mathematica constructs that are easy to break into
small pieces so that students can experience success and understanding along
the way, and that are easy to explain to folks new to Mathematica.

If you would be interested in helping this cause I, and many other
beginners, would greatly appreciate it. Your involvement could be as little
as helping to get me unstuck and showing me ways of doing things to as big
as writing demonstration apps, which you could also post to the Mathematica
Demonstrations site.

Thanks very much.

Sol


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