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  • #6752
    SmoranMadis
    Participant

    The language you use determines how you think. This is the concept of linguistic relativity: that language influences thought, and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. Stephen Wolfram, in his blog about computational essays, argues that this is especially true of computer languages. The symbolic nature of Wolfram Language allows one to describe and conceptualise complex ideas in one word, that normally would take tens or hundreds of lines of code in any other computer language.A natural way of expressing a language is writing in prose, and the Wolfram Language allows the user to understand and express real-world ideas and processes in a readable, precise, and interactive style – a Computational Essay.

    The ideal computational essay is written to convey a scientific message with the audience in mind, and contains a mixture of code, text, and other supporting visual elements. Although simple in theory, in practice it can be difficult to write a computational essay in a way that carries a narrative in an organised, visually engaging, and flowing manner. In the same way that Wolfram Language directs the user as they are writing code with colours, visual cues, and automatic formatting, a similar paradigm can be followed to direct a user to write better computational essays.
    Improving Computational Essays

    The goal of this project was to develop methods to automatically give feedback to the Computational Essay writer, and provide a framework to validate and submit the essay once completed. The end result of this project is a method to test that computational essays are:

    Valid notebooks that do not contain errors or profanity
    Do not contain outdated or obsolete functions
    Standardised in their options including: magnification, window size, and position

    Each of these tasks can be done by the user with simple button presses on the GUI I created, and it is all done within the context of their own notebook.
    How can a notebook test itself?

    Most of the time it’s a great thing that everything behind the scenes in a notebook just happens automatically, but there are some concepts that are worth understanding which are involved in the process of a notebook testing itself. The following is my attempt at simplifying what exactly is going on behind the scenes so it makes sense what is going on when I introduce code that reads some lower-level, less human-understandable representations of user input.

    The Front End

    The Front End is what you’re looking at when you’re writing a Wolfram Language notebook. It is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Mathematica which takes a user’s input like keystrokes and mouse clicks and converts them into objects that the Kernel can understand. The Kernel is what handles the evaluation and computation of the messages that are passed to it by the Front End, then give them back for the Front End to turn for us to read.

    Typically, user input is converted by the Front End into “Boxes.” For example:

    This text, with some styles applied is all handled by boxes which the Front End renders!

    To see what the Front End renders into the things you see, use the menu command Cell > Show Expression in a notebook. Below is the Expression:

    Cell[TextData[StyleBox[“This text, with some styles applied is all handled by boxes which the \ Front End renders!”, FontWeight->”Bold”, FontSlant->”Italic”, FontColor->GrayLevel[0]]], “Text”, CellChangeTimes->{{3.7716860193897715*^9, 3.7716860207409754^9}, {3.771686053604227^9, 3.771686107490671*^9}}]

    All this information is stored in the cell, which is what the Front End will be looking at when performing operations on a notebook.

    #6753
    OlivieMelco
    Participant

    I mainly use computational essays to check the grammar and style of my work.

    #6754
    MartColson
    Participant

    I would say that in education, computational thinking is a set of problem-solving techniques that involve expressing problems and their solutions in ways that a computer can do. It includes the mental skills and practices for designing calculations that make computers do the work for humans, as well as interpreting the world as a complex of information processes. That is why services such as the essay writing service reddit are beneficial in making the process of writing an essay easier for the user.

    #7012
    max
    Participant

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    • This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by max.
    #7353
    Lucas
    Participant

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