technology with intention
Posts tagged WolframAlpha
Where do we go from here?
1257 days
by Jac de Haan
in 6th Grade
The 6th grade concluded Internet boot camp this week. Everyone is clear on why Billings provides computers and Internet access and their responsibilities as users. We took a moment to define some common terms that will be used throughout their middle school technology experiences.
Student definitions:
| Web broswer | an application used to connect to the internet. |
| Application (app, program) |
software that can be installed on a computer to complete a task. |
| Software | a set of instructions telling a computer what to do when it receives input from a keyboard or mouse. |
| Search engine | a website you visit using a web browser so that you can find information on the internet. |
The difference between a web browser and search engine has been murky in the past for some students. We reinforced our Microsoft Excel skills from STeM class to build a comparison chart:
| Company | Web Browser | Search Engine |
| Microsoft | Internet Explorer | Bing |
| Chrome | ||
| Apple | Safari | x |
| Yahoo! | x | Yahoo! |
| Mozilla | Firefox | x |
| Wolfram | x | WolframAlpha |
| Opera | Opera | x |
Q.O.D. – WolframAlpha to the rescue
1260 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
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:
