Goodbye, Eureka
Of course age is a factor. If I were in school right now, I would think that Wolfram Alpha is the greatest thing ever, the savior that would liberate me from the torments of math. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that solves calculus, physics, geometry, chemistry problems. You type in the problem, press enter, and voila.
But I left school decades ago, when students did their math homework themselves, from scratch. Calculators were allowed only if the numbers were too big or too small, if there were numbers at all. To put it plainly, I feel cheated. . .
Goodbye, Eureka, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 12th, 2009 at 20:02
I’m a physics teacher, and when I read the paper this morning and saw your article, I thought this would be a serious problem. I just checked the site out, and I think it won’t pose much of a problem for teachers. The site still requires some amount of analysis on the students’ part before they can use the program.
Some modern calculators are also able to perform the same functions, but math classes prevail over them. At least these things would force educators to teach students how to think, not merely to solve problems that have skeleton solutions.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:52
Without good study, most buttons in them fancy-schamncy doohickey calculators is rendered useless.
July 14th, 2009 at 19:39
Engaging students to learn should be paramount to our good teacher’s aims… Wolfram Alpha’s a pretty good tool for complex computations.
Am just wondering what you folks can say about this article…
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/07/13/i_want_my_cybor.html