I recently took a Middle Level Math Methods class and the instructor shared
this website with us. I had heard of it before but never spent much time with it. When I tutored higher level math, some of my students would use this website to check their answers. They were able to type in a complicated calculus problem and Wolfram-Alpha could evaluate the integral for you. I thought that was so cool! I hadn't realized all the other great information Wolfram-Alpha could provide. Below is a list of categories Wolfram-Alpha has organized their info into:
You can click on any of the above categories to see some of the information you can search for within this site. It is pretty cool to see the computational information that is attached to all of these different categories. I could see this website being great for an inquiry based learning unit. I may try to incorporate this website into a unit on statistics and probability in my 8th grade classroom. You can type just about anything into the search bar and Wolfram-Alpha will return some number that are attached to what you typed in. For example, if I wanted my students to learn more about their community, I could type in "Austin neighborhood, Chicago" and Wolfram-Alpha will tell me the size of the neighborhood in square miles and population. It will tell you the time and temperature in Austin and it has a link to the wikipedia page about the Austin neighborhood.
I think students would have a lot of fun navigating through this site and collecting data on different subjects that interest them.
