But now here is W|A, which can graph functions, perform symbolic algebra and calculus computations, even solve differential equations and do number theory and statistics and all manner of interesting stuff besides, including but very much not limited to mathematics. These have been a fixture in math education, especially at the pre-college level, for the better part of 20 years. I’m thinking particularly of the graphing calculator. One thing that seems clear is that, with technology available that is free and powerful and hardware-agnostic, technology that previously has ruled the ed-tech roost can’t survive for much longer.

But the potential is there for W|A to be a game-changing technological advance, doing for quantitative information what Google did for text and web-based information back in the 90’s. For me, W|A is still a little raw and gives back too many “ Wolfram |Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” responses when given mathematically legitimate (at least they seem so to me) queries. There is considerable debate among ed-tech people as to exactly what kind of impact Wolfram|Alpha, abbreviated W|A, is going to have in education. If you haven’t, here’s a good place to start. By now, you’ve probably heard about Wolfram|Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” that was recently rolled out by the makers of Mathematica.

Wolfram online calculator