Billings Beta » WolframAlpha

Where do we go from here?

Jac de Haan — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:07:02 +0000

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
Google	Chrome	Google
Apple	Safari	x
Yahoo!	x	Yahoo!
Mozilla	Firefox	x
Wolfram	x	WolframAlpha
Opera	Opera	x

Q.O.D. – WolframAlpha to the rescue

Jac de Haan — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:43:09 +0000

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: