Friday, December 9, 2011

Wolfram CDF

I have been experimenting with Wolfram's new Comuptable Document Format. I think it is a great asset for math teachers to deploy interactive visualizations to their students. Now I can create Manipulations in Mathematica and have my students interact with them without having the software. Additionally, they can download Demonstrations from the Wolfram site!
In the example below, I show the input and the Manipulate output for a problem that we did in class (find the quadratic function that has x-intercepts at 5 and -3 and passes through the point (2,2)).
Since I use blogspot, I toggled over to the HTML part and pasted in this code:
All you need to do is change the location of the site hosting my CDF file and the width and height of the embed (in my case width=400 and height=800).

<script src="http://www.wolfram.com/cdf-player/plugin/v2.1/cdfplugin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var cdf = new cdfplugin();
cdf.embed('TheWebsiteThatHostsMyCDFdocument', 400, 800);
</script>

If you are having trouble hosting your document, you can put it in a public document on Dropbox. If you don't have an account yet, I get some extra space with a referral and you get 2GB free! My referral link: Dropbox referral link. Currently, you cannot just host your document in Google Docs and embed it.