Shaking Up Math Education
In case you missed this, there’s a great Wall Street Journal article and blog post about Wolfram Alpha …
Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes (The Wall Street Journal, 6/16/09)
Wolfram Alpha, A New Online Computation Engine Shakes Up Math (The Numbers Guy Blog, 6/16/09)
Of course, I could just think they are great because I was quoted in them. 
Possibly Related Posts:
- Mathfaery: Elizabeth Hamman
- Upcoming Events
- Best of 2008 (Part II)
- Best of 2008 (Part I)
- Carnival of Math: Mindmap Edition
A few notes in playing with WA so I can be ready this fall for my students…
* Not every problem has the “show steps” option available.
* When determining the equation of a line from a pair of points, it lists general form and slope-intercept form, but it does not list point-slope form, which I often prefer to use.
* It is also a bit picky in how queries are stated by the user. One of Carl Bialik’s examples of WA failing was actually a failure of how to properly express a constrained domain in the query. He gave “Maximize -x^3+4x^2 on the interval between -1 and 5″ as an example that failed. Using “Maximize -x^3+4x^2 from x= -1 to 5″ provides the correct results, albeit without the steps used to determine the results.
Long and the short of it… students will use WA. It is up to us as instructors to realize this and realize the limitations of WA. If we realize the limitations, we can see if they are taking shortcuts. If we want the students to understand the underlying content and principles then we just have to question them about those, but more importantly, we have to TEACH them the underlying principles and content.
My W|A fun this week was entering terms:
Ross Mandy Neil
and
English German
- just chock full of graphs, percentages, potential elementary math questions
Nice to see you in the news!
R
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