Abstract:

The availability of Digital Open Access educational content is changing the idea of a textbook for a given course. Today, teachers can use fragments of a digital document for one part of their course and use material from a different source for another. The authors of this paper have been working, first, in the generation of Wolfram Mathematica notebooks with interactive computational content for a course on Heat Transfer, then in complementing those materials with theoretical context. As a result, we have 32 interactive notebooks, in which texts and simulators are integrated. All these previous works, whose evolution has been presented at other Edulearn meetings, were developed manually. This current work defines a methodology that could be used to personalize the content in the notebooks automatically.

The methodology consists of the following steps:
• Development of a template
• Content recovery from Open Access repositories
• Construction of a directory with the recovered materials
• Content search within that directory
• Construction of a database with the selected materials.
• Filling the template with the database contents

All steps can be performed using Wolfram Mathematica. To illustrate the use of some of the Mathematica commands involved, in this paper we show how to use a Wikipedia’s Heat Transfer article as a source of information to automatically fill a template.

Keywords:

Heat Transfer, Interactive notebooks, automatic notebooks construction, Open Acces repositories, Wikipedia contents.