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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 The Parents' Choice Award was an award presented by the non-profit Parents' Choice Foundation to recognize "the very best products for children of different ages and backgrounds, and of varied skill and interest levels." It was considered a "prest ...
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, optimiza ...
'' 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 ...
s,
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 ...
's Flash, and the open-source
Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...
. 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 User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...
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 refer ...
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 profession ...
. Its business model is similar to Adobe's Acrobat 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