What if you could go to a free and readily available website and enter an equation, an expression, a question about math, a request to analyze data, or anything else, and the site would answer your question, elaborate on it, give you all the steps for the mathematical work, etc.?
Did that make you uneasy or excited?
Well, ready or not, it’s going online at 7pm CST today, and I think we ought to pay some attention to this.
You can watch a screencast about Wolfram Alpha here.
It does have the potential to seriously wreak havoc on the way we teach math today if students can simply copy all their work from an A.I. website. Whether you think that it’s time that somebody forced a change, or whether you think it’s just hype and not really a threat, I think we should all be aware that after today, it exists.