The Day STEM Education Changed By Stephen Best, SIGPL
Sometimes, change happens slowly. We can see the change coming from a mile away, and when it reaches us, we educators can easily adapt our instruction to address the change. Take Google and internet search as an example. We had a few years of Yahoo’s early web directories and dodgy web searches to get used to the idea, and Google so greatly refined the process of the internet search (and did so in such an easy manner it didn’t require significant training to learn the tool) that we were ready to pick it up and run with it in our classrooms.
At other times, something comes along that so changes our world as teachers that we don’t really know how to best utilize it. We’ve done this before, even in STEM topics… For instance, how many years did it take for calculators to go from being banned in the classroom to having those wall-mounted calculator cozies for every middle and high school math classroom? Exactly 17 years and 4 months, give or take a day. Why? Because their capabilities cut into what we did as teachers in pretty dramatic ways. Why do I bring all of this up? Because STEM education is going to change completely… all because of one new tool. STEM teachers, welcome to Wolfram Alpha?
WHAT IS WOLFRAM ALPHA? Wolfram Alpha started as a new type of search tool, which I like to think of as a “data engine.” If you go to the web site
wolframalpha.com, which is actually just one of their many tools, you will see a search interface similar to what you see with Google or Bing - a single text entry box that encourages you to search for something. But, instead of giving you a billion pages that might have information related to your search (along with 2 billion that definitely don’t), Wolfram Alpha digs deeper and tries to actually answer your question with the information you are trying to find, and uses relevant data to support it. For instance, if I want to know more about the climate of our state to see how the weather may have changed over time, I could simply do a search for “climate of Lansing Michigan.” Unlike Google, which might give links to multiple weather sites that give current weather information, as well as broader sites that address the cultural climate, business climate, or other such misnomers, Wolfram Alpha actually gives the relevant climate data, summarized in graphs and tables on the equivalent of a single page of information. And, if I wanted expanded details of this, I can simply click on the “more” link at the bottom of a section to get this. If using the web browser version (as opposed to a dedicated iPad app as shown in the screenshot images), another link at the bottom of each section allows for downloading of the relevant data in a spreadsheet. This is how Wolfram Alpha handles any search that incorporates relevant data.
Wolfram Alpha is also based upon the Mathematica software that Wolfram pioneered over a decade ago, which has become the standard computational and analysis tool for universities and researchers alike. Because of this, you can enter any mathematics expression or function into the Wolfram Alpha search box, and it will solve the equation, graph the function, and if you want, show you the step-by-step process to determine
Wolfram Alpha is a data-based “search engine” that generates graphs and tables to show the information you are looking for, such as the climate data for Michigan.
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Wolfram Alpha allows you to enter equations to plot, or allows you to solve equations showing steps, using its computational capabilities.
| MACULJOURNAL
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