The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an organized, open-source collection of small (or medium-size) interactive programs called Demonstrations, which are meant to visually and interactively represent ideas from a range of fields. It is hosted by

Wolfram Research Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include ...

, whose stated goal is to bring computational exploration to a large population. At its launch, it contained 1300 demonstrations but has grown to over 10,000. The site won a Parents' Choice Award in 2008.

Technology

The Demonstrations run in ''

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

'' 6 or above and in '' Wolfram CDF Player'' which is a free modified version of Wolfram's ''Mathematica'' and available for Windows, Linux and macOS and can operate as a web browser plugin. They typically consist of a very direct user interface to a graphic or visualization, which dynamically recomputes in response to user actions such as moving a slider, clicking a button, or dragging a piece of graphics. Each Demonstration also has a brief description of the concept. Demonstrations are now easily embeddable into any website or blog. Each Demonstration page includes a snippet of JavaScript code in the Share section of the sidebar.

Topics

The website is organized by topic: for example, science, mathematics, computer science, art, biology, and finance. They cover a variety of levels, from elementary school mathematics to much more advanced topics such as quantum mechanics and models of biological organisms. The site is aimed at both educators and students, as well as researchers who wish to present their ideas to the broadest possible audience.

Process

Wolfram Research's staff organizes and edits the Demonstrations, which may be created by any user of ''Mathematica'', then freely publishedThrowing beanbags in Mathematica 6
Scientific Computing, May 17, 2007. and freely downloaded. The Demonstrations are open-source, which means that they not only demonstrate the concept itself but also show how to implement it.

Alternatives

The use of the web to transmit small interactive programs is reminiscent of Sun's

Java applet Java applets were small applications written in the Java programming language, or another programming language that compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. The user launched the Java applet from a ...

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * Flash (DC Comics character), several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Barry Allen) ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Wally West, the first K ...

, and the open-source Processing. However, those creating Demonstrations have access to the algorithmic and visualization capabilities of ''Mathematica'' making it more suitable for technical demonstrations. The Demonstrations Project also has similarities to user-generated content websites like

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refere ...

and

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professio ...

. Its business model is similar to Adobe's

Acrobat Acrobatics () is the performance of human feats of balance, agility, and motor coordination. Acrobatic skills are used in performing arts, sporting events, and martial arts. Extensive use of acrobatic skills are most often performed in acro ...

and Flash strategy of charging for development tools but providing a free reader.

References

External links

Official site
{{Wolfram Research Mathematics websites Mathematics literature Mathematics education Open educational resources Physics education Wolfram Research