This thing is crazy! I don’t remember ever before being so excited about a search engine. Probably because Wolfram is so much more than that.

Still in it’s infancy, testing stage even, this new engine will still return the occasional error but considering the fun I was having, the glitches were ignored.

It’s a given; students can fly through the internet as if it were their own bedroom. Often I hear people associate ‘the internet’ with ‘wasting time on MySpace’. Sure, introduce a student to a school where they have free rein and they’re going to hang out in the playground. Right? It takes a teacher to show them the science lab to discover the wonders of space exploration.

If we are going to truly educate this next generation about the educational value of the internet, awareness of such brilliant tools such as Wolfram is essential. I’m no statistics nerd, but I couldn’t help but become engrossed in the wealth of data Wolfram was able to offer.

Enter a birthday to find out what time the sun rose that day, what time it set, what was the moon doing…? It’s a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a calculator, a stock report and… it makes learning fun!

‘Google it’ has become a household term. We know that. There’s dwindling value in asking a student to look it up, it’s too easy. The challenge I found with an extreme array of data at my findertips was; what do I ask it?! Then in the classroom, how can this be applied? That’s the fun part, the part that really got my brain ticking, the part that made me think hard, outside the box. First I tried ‘weather Brisbane’ – interesting, then; ‘weather brisbane 5 october 1973′ (my birthday) – pretty cool, then I went exploring and saw ‘compute the frequency and other properties of a musical note‘ – are you kidding?! So this science calculator would be brilliant in a music class!

I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about Walfram in the coming months. Who knows? We may even be ‘just wolfing it’ before too long?

1. Record presentations and explanations of key mathematical concepts and their real-world applications, using diagrams, images and/or video footage where possible.
2. Record the steps in using a particular mathematical formula, using diagrams, images and/or video footage where possible. For example, record mnemonic rhymes that will help students remember a mathematical process or use video footage to document the process of working out a mathematical problem using a particular formula.
3. Record interviews (or mock interviews) with experts in mathematics, for a radio show type segment.
4. Record student progress in mathematics. For example, a student may record how they would work through a type of mathematical problem and this can be used for assessment purposes to show evidence of the students progress in mathematics throughout the year.
5. Record student goals for mathematics and reflections throughout the year in terms of how they have been working to achieve their goals.
6. Record mathematical problems for students to solve, or have students create them for each other. For example, if you are covering fractions you might give the students the problem as a recording: “You have 1/3 of your wage is paid in tax, but you are able to claim back 1/2 of that, because you have a good accountant. What portion of your wage ends up being paid in tax?” Alternatively, get students to create maths quizzes, which they can share with other students and then correct each others answers.

Click here: A Math Teacher’s Experience