Once upon a time, education was all about packing as much information as possible into a human brain.
That’s the route down which education appears to be headed. Homework isn’t really about learning to do a calculation, but rather about learning to find and understand an answer regardless of how the calculation is executed. Dixon believes that Wolfram|Alpha can build confidence in students who don’t see themselves as having mathematical minds. It’s not that Wolfram Alpha has helped students “‘get through’ a math class by doing their homework for them,” he says, “but that we helped them actually understand what they were doing” in the first place. If the purpose of homework is build greater understanding of concepts as presented in class, Joyce is adamant that teachers should view Wolfram|Alpha as an asset. Much of this comes down to what homework is. Still, the prevailing notion that Wolfram|Alpha is a form of cheating doesn’t appear to be dissipating. As Alexander Feiner, an aspiring engineer and high school freshman told me, Wolfram|Alpha is a study aid, not a way of avoiding work - something that Dixon insists is the norm when it comes to out-of-classroom student use. “When you start to show educators the potential,” Dixon says, “you can see points where their eyes light up.”įor every teacher who’s converted to Dixon’s camp, there are multitudes of students who have been there for a while. The "problem generator" can pull from real datasets to create relevant examples. A "show steps" button, which reveals the path to an answer, allows teachers to break down the components of a problem, rather than getting bogged down in mechanics. It also has enormous potential within the classroom. Indeed, the people who are directing the tool’s development view it as an educational equalizer that can give students who don’t have at-home homework helpers-like tutors or highly educated and accessible parents-access to what amounts to a personal tutor. Wolfram Research, Dixon says, wants to engage with teachers like Garcia, who are frustrated by the tool, to help them understand how it can help their students. Only recently can computers calculate things automatically and precisely, and it’ll take some time for curriculums, and the teachers that are beholden to them, to catch up. That’s because there wasn’t tech to fall back on and, when tech did start to appear, it wasn’t reliable. Historically, education had to emphasize hand calculations, says John Dixon, a program manager at Wolfram Research. Five years after receiving his MacArthur Fellowship, Wolfram began developing Mathematica, and in 1988 Wolfram Research announced the release of its flagship product.Īlan Joyce, the director of content development for Wolfram Alpha, says that cheating is “absolutely the wrong way to look at what we do.” But the staff understands what might make teachers uncomfortable. Wolfram became obsessed with complex systems and how computers could be used to study them. Yet the tool that helped Wolfram build his reputation with physics ended up pulling him away from science.
In 1981, Wolfram became the youngest person to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship. By programming it to solve equations and find patterns in data, he could leave the math to the machine and focus his brain on the science. His solution was to get his hands on a computer. He could come up with concepts, but executing calculations was hard. By 12, he’d written a dictionary on physics, by his early teens he’d churned out three (as yet unpublished) books, and by 15 he was publishing scientific papers.ĭespite his wunderkind science abilities, math was a constant stumbling block. Growing up, Wolfram’s obsession was physics. Indeed, the inspiration for Wolfram|Alpha, which he released in 2009, started with Wolfram’s own struggles as a math student. Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division and didn’t learn his times tables until he’d hit 40. They say that Wolfram|Alpha is the future. What some call cheating, others have heralded as a massive step forward in how we learn, what we teach, and what education is even good for.
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Though Wolfram|Alpha was designed to be an educational asset - a way to explore an equation from within- academia has found itself at a loss over how to respond.
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