Question of the day: online research skills
Which of the current President’s daughters’ nicknames was more popular in the last public record of U.S. baby names?

Students quickly recognized that this was a “think and search” question…and there were multiple puzzles to solve:

  • current President: Barack Obama
  • daughters’ nicknames: Sasha & Malia
  • last public record: 2008

So the question became, “Which name was more popular in 2008, Sasha or Malia?”

There were quite a few ways of finding this answer using search engines.  Most students ended up at babynames.com or the Social Security Administration website.  Some employed the Control+F keyboard shortcut to search for names in a list.

Once the dust settled, Halley, Elijah and Twig took top prize for cracking the code!  We then took a few minutes to get familiar with  WolframAlpha, a computational knowledge engine that is built specifically for mathematical and statistical analysis.  Typing in “sasha, malia name 2008″ quickly netted a clear answer:

WolframAlpha analysis - malia & sasha