Curriculum and Activities
The Wolfram High School Summer Camp is an intensive program and focuses on a variety of academic activities. Activities throughout the two-week camp will blend active learning with opportunities to socialize with other students.
Learning Wolfram Language
Before camp, you will be assigned several chapters of An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language to study so that you know the basics of Wolfram Language before we begin. When camp starts, you will be guided through exercises, coding challenges and activities that will solidify your understanding before you begin your project.
Specialist Lectures
Throughout the camp, there will be lectures on a variety of topics, given by mentors from the Summer Camp and the Wolfram Summer School. In previous years, these topics have ranged from natural language processing and computational farming to computational poetry and machine learning with finance data.
Independent Project Time
During camp, you will spend the most time working on your project. You will work independently, supported by your individual mentor and by your peers.
Social Activities
Outside of your intense academic schedule, you will have the opportunity to engage in social events, including video game tournaments, special interest discussions, trivia hour and livecoding challenges.
Hands-on Challenges
Over the course of the Summer Camp, you will engage in plenty of hands-on activities. From solving puzzles using algorithms to finding solutions to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon problem, you will stretch your coding and computational thinking muscles.
Projects
The central focus for the Wolfram Summer Camp is your project. These projects are done independently, with the help and support of a personal mentor and the other camp faculty. You will be given a list of interesting projects and will have the opportunity to choose from the list or suggest your own. You will then work with Stephen Wolfram to select a definitive project.
To learn more about the project-selection process and to see examples of some previous projects, you can read Stephen Wolfram's blog post about the 2017 Wolfram High School Summer Camp. To explore student projects in depth, you can listen to our Wolfram Student Podcast, where camp graduates explain their work and what they learned at camp.
Sample Schedule
Each day will be slightly different, with a higher balance of Wolfram Language learning at the beginning of camp and with an increasing emphasis on independent project time as camp progresses. There will also be plenty of opportunities for learning outside of the classroom.
- 7–8:30am : Breakfast and social activity
- 8:30–11am : Wolfram Language learning
- 11am–12pm : Specialist lecture
- 12–1pm : Lunch
- 1–2pm : Experiential learning
- 2–5pm : Independent project time
- 5–7pm : Experiential learning or social activity
- 7–9pm : Dinner and free time
- 9–10pm : Dorm activities
