Computational essays can also provide a great showcase of student achievement, as well as a means of assessing student understanding. The process of creating a computational essay is a great way for students to engage with material they’re studying. A computational essay has both text and computation-combined to build up a narrative to which both human and computer contribute. So students can use them not just to do their computations, but also to keep notes, and to explain the computations they’re doing, or the results they get:Īnd in fact, Wolfram Notebooks enable a whole new kind of student work: computational essays. They can also contain text and structure. And then save your work in the notebook, to continue-or review what you did-another time.īut notebooks aren’t just for storing computations. And then-right there in the notebook-see how all your steps fit together to give your final results. Because by being able to work through things in a sequence of steps, students get to really engage with the computations they’re doing. But it’s the use of the notebook environment that makes it so uniquely valuable for education. Instead, everything is in a Wolfram Notebook, where you can save and use previous results, and build up or work through a whole computation:īeing able to use Wolfram|Alpha-style free-form input is what opens Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition up to the full range of students. But now you’re not just getting a one-shot answer. Just type input the way you would in Wolfram|Alpha. It’s built on a huge tower of technology, but what it does is to let any student-without learning any syntax or reading any documentation- immediately build up or work through computations. Well, that’s what we’ve done in Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition. It’s also how generations of higher-level students have been taught.īut what about students who aren’t ready to use Mathematica yet? What if we could take the power of Mathematica (and what’s now the Wolfram Language), but combine it with the ease of Wolfram|Alpha? And for more than 30 years that’s how countless inventions and discoveries have been made around the world. It’s incredibly useful-especially when coupled with its step-by-step solution capabilities.īut what if one doesn’t want just a one-shot answer? What if one wants to build up (or work through) a whole computation? Well, that’s what we created Mathematica and its whole notebook interface to do. But it’s a one-shot process: a student enters the question they want to ask ( say in math) and Wolfram|Alpha gives them the (usually richly contextualized) answer.
Whether in college or high school, Wolfram|Alpha has become a ubiquitous way for students to get answers. Wolfram|Alpha has been a huge hit with students.
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