It’s a Computational Knowledge Engine. A what?! It’s Wolfram Alpha.
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?
Written by Brad Halcrow.Brisbane Beyond Chalk Facilitator
