Your Personal Curriculum for Coding in Wolfram Language

Open up TikTok, and your feed may show videos of duck paintings, randomly generated sandwiches and everything in between.

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If you’re a lifelong learner, another trend may have caught your eye: personal curricula.

What’s a Personal Curriculum?

In late summer 2025, videos explaining personal learning goals began to appear on people’s For You pages (FYPs). An FYP is a custom feed of videos that TikTok thinks you’d find interesting. It features videos that are subject specific, but sometimes viral ones as well. Once an idea hits people’s FYPs, it often spreads.

Personal curricula are self-made study paths with set structures and goals. They follow individual interests but also mimic the format of traditional schooling. A personal curriculum may include a syllabus with readings, course objectives and assignments. Many people opt for taking several “courses,” designing curricula for each.

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What does this look like in practice? A person wanting to learn music theory might find resources on chords and keys and have homework on transcription or transposing songs. Another person might align more with coursework in higher education, creating a “seminar” on something more niche like a particular art style or themes across several books.

Learning to Code, Wolfram Style

One topic that appears often on people’s curricula is learning to code. While personal curricula might seem like fancy ✨ ways of setting goals, they also include tasks that promote deeper learning than simply reading a book. For learners wanting to study code, curricula include not just learning about code structures but also taking the time to understand documentation and practicing coding itself.

If you want to learn how to code in Wolfram Language, there are many resources available. You can create a personal curriculum that focuses on your own skill level and areas of interest. Even better, because of the shareability of notebooks and lively conversations between Wolfram Language users, you can make real-world connections as you learn, just like in a classroom.

Backward Design for Creating Curricula

To begin, think about what you want to take from the experience. The best personal curricula consider the personal aspects of what draws you to the subject. For Wolfram Language, you may want to learn code that connects with your interests in math and science. If you’re an artist, maybe you want to consider how code can create computational art.

“Cerne Abbas Walk” recreated in the Wolfram Language (https://medium.com/tech-based-teaching/taking-the-cerne-abbas-walk-from-conceptual-art-to-computational-art-adcccec8472a)

Once you have your course aims, you can work backward. To do W and X, you need to learn Y and Z. This sort of backward design is common in education, with teachers working through course objectives to build their syllabi and create assignments. In creating a personal curriculum, you take on this role.

Building a Wolfram Language Curriculum

To start with Wolfram Language, you need to understand how the code works. Fortunately, there are several resources that can act as required reading for your course:

• ***An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language** — This online textbook and *interactive course walk you through the basics of Wolfram Language. Readings can be broken down week by week into sets of chapters.
• **Wolfram Language documentation **— Documentation is clear and topical, which can enhance your knowledge of specific parts of the code.
• **Wolfram Function Repository **— Optional reading that can deepen your knowledge of functions available as a part of the codebase.

If you want to learn on a subject-specific pathway, Wolfram U offers courses in many different specialized tracks. For example, going back to our coder-artist, the free Creative Computation course opens up possibilities for expanding creative expression — and coding at the same time.

An important part of designing your curriculum is using resources that are well developed and researched. Generative AI can offer ideas for curricular pathways, but you must be willing to fact-check. Be responsible and confirm what it shares with you! Resources from or affiliated with Wolfram technologies are a good bet.

Practice Makes Perfect

With interactive courses, you can practice with small, targeted tasks. That said, you’ll want to consider not just the resources of your personal curriculum but also the objectives and artifacts — that is, what you learn and what you’ll create to express that learning.

Signing up for a free Wolfram Cloud account will get you started with coding in a real (not just live) environment. While doing exercises is good, typing out code and seeing how it runs in a notebook is better. Assign yourself a project to create something small, like a generator for random images, words, sentences — whatever “things” you envision. Give yourself a small win, then go bigger.

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In addition to practicing writing your own code, you can find others’ notebooks shared on Wolfram Community (often with commentary) as well as on the Wolfram Blog. Seeing how another person tackles a problem can be very illustrative, and typing out their code can be a similar exercise to copying a paragraph from an author’s book to better understand their writing style.

A computational thinking mindset is helpful for breaking down problems and setting up problem-solving structures. The December tradition Advent of Code, which offers problem sets designed to be code-agnostic but solved with programming skills, can offer ways to stretch your computational thinking skills. Consider ways, however oblique, to try solving problems or creating data visualizations.

Practice Good Study Habits — and Stay Motivated

Just like students attending classes in K–12 or college, learners on a personal curriculum pathway benefit from evidence-based learning practices. For example, cramming isn’t effective for long-term recall, but flashcards can be! If you want to supercharge your learning, assess your study habits.

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The blog The Learning Scientists offers many student-focused resources (such as this post on using textbooks more effectively) that look at educational research and provide tips on better studying. For example, those flashcards? Those can be used more effectively too!

Of course, even the most effective study habits won’t help if you get demotivated. As you are planning out your personal curriculum, consider your schedule and don’t take on too much work. Just as an advisor would help you adjust your course load in college — mind that credit hour max! — so should you think about your upcoming obligations and work-life balance.

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Keep Going!

Learning is wonderful. Learning to code is wonderful. Both broaden the world just a bit more, allowing you to see things in a new way.

If you can’t fully commit to a personal curriculum, or if you don’t learn as much as you’d like, that’s okay. You’ll still end up knowing more than when you started.

Good luck!

About the blogger:

Jesika Brooks, MLIS

Jesika Brooks is an editor and bookworm. A lifelong learner herself, she has always been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology. She edits the Tech-Based Teaching blog (and always wants to hear from new voices!)