Webwatcher: Wolfram alpha

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Russell Stannard finds questions galore are answered at Wolfram alpha.


I keep hearing the term Web 3.0 and finally I have begun to understand it. If all the information that was on the internet was properly tagged so that it could be easily found, then research programs would be a lot more powerful because they could grab information from the net more easily. The Wolfram alpha website (www.wolframalpha.com) is an amazing example of the potential. You can type in all sorts of questions and it will give you an answer. The answers are often quite detailed, too. The possibilities for language teaching are enormous.

Trying Wolfram alpha out

Wolfram alpha works best with statistical and geographical information. It doesn’t provide biographies, etc, but it does provide loads of facts at the touch of a button. Try entering some of the following questions:

  • What is the population of London?
  • What is the population of London and Paris?
  • What is the GDP of Iceland?
  • When was Barack Obama born?
  • What was the weather like on 27/1/2000?
  • What is the life expectancy of a 44-year-old male in the UK?
  • How many internet users are there in Europe?

But your questions don’t have to be about things like this. You can also ask questions about the English language. (Sometimes it is better to simply formulate an instruction rather than a question.) Try entering some of the items below. What you will get is in brackets after each one.

  • Words starting with IC (a list of words with IC at the beginning)
  • Words ending with ION (a list of words with ION at the end)
  • Word: Dangerous (a detailed definition)
  • W-t-h (a list of words that fit this pattern)

You can do all sorts of things. Try simply writing in a word or some numbers, and you will get all kinds of information:

  • Russell (information about the popularity of the name)
  • 27/01/65 (information about this date)
  • Manchester (all sorts of information about the city)
  • Running 4 km/h male 1.83m 90kg (information about the number of calories burnt)
  • Chicken sandwich (information about fat, calories, etc)

Using Wolfram alpha in class

Here are some activities for using this website in class. You can increase the level by getting the students to interpret more of the information. It is a good idea to play around with the tool first so that you get a good idea of just what information it can provide. A helpful way to start is to watch this video: www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html  

Activity 1  

Put the students into groups. Give them lists of cities. Tell them to input the names into Wolfram alpha and find out the population of each city and the names of two cities that are nearby. To do this, they will need to skim through the answers to find the correct information.

Activity 2  

Get the students to key in their birthdates and find out what day of the year it was, how many days they have been alive and the names of two famous people who were born on that day. To do this, again they will need to read and skim to find the correct information.

Activity 3  

Give the students a list of cities around the world. Get them to find out what the weather is like today in those places.

Activity 4  

Give the students a list of foods. Tell them to guess how many calories there are in each one and to put them in order of most to least calories. Then tell them to key them into Wolfram alpha and check their answers. How many did they get right? Which ones came out top and bottom? Were there any surprises?

Activity 5  

Tell the students to write their own questions. Suggest a maximum of ten. Now see how many of them they can find the answer to in Wolfram alpha. Afterwards, the students can report back to the rest of the class on the things they found out.

Activity 6  

Give the students a grid that includes the names of six countries, with space to write the inflation, GDP and growth rates in those countries. Put the students into groups and tell them to complete the grid as quickly as possible. Afterwards, the groups can compare their answers.

Activity 7  

Give out a list of companies and ask the students to find out two (or more) major pieces of information about them. Again you can vary the information or you could give different lists to different groups who then share the information with each other. You could do the same with celebrities, too.

I could go on and on. This site really has a lot of potential for both creating questions and interpreting information. I have put together a video to help you use the site and show you some of the possibilities. You can watch it at: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/wolfram/index.html.introducingwolframalpha.html  


Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in
Information and Communications Technology (ICT). He runs the website www.teachertrainingvideos.com and writes regular tweets at  Http://twitter.com/russell1955.


This article first appeared in English Teaching professional issue 65, November 2009


 

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