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Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

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Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#61

Post by JoeAltmaier »

yequalsx wrote: post #58
adamnemecek wrote: post #11

Playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin there Denise Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah, that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive. The best part is that people in the school administration might do something like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel like they've dealt successfully with t…

Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years. I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire. Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can'…

Sounds like Mathematica is the way to go then? Because it turned out students who could do the problems. The 'old paradigm' leaves most behind, which serves no one.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#62

Post by FeepingCreature »

roumenguha wrote: post #55
SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator can do, you can do, and just as fast. And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and she started at the board solving the same thing. She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.

That says more about the book than about calculators. :)

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#63

Post by adamnemecek »

reikonomusha wrote: post #54
adamnemecek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree This is the wrong approach. There's no way you wouldn't understand math much better with these tools. I'm hoping that in the future, math will be less about equations and symbols and more about graphing and being able to move around in the spaces described by the equations. I would draw an analogy with a compiler. After using it for some time, y…

I would claim that most folks who have a reasonable understanding of fundamental computer architecture and assembly are those who actively learned it. Folks who have just used a compiler for everything, in my experience, rarely actually develop the understanding innately. Compilers still have this "magic" element associated with them.

It's not either or, it's a dance. You make a hypothesis in your head, verify it with a compiler. If result matches your hypothesis, move on. If not, investigate.

For me personally, I thought I kinda knew assembly until I started using https://godbolt.org when I realized that I really didn't know assembly. This site helped a lot of other people as well. Note that all it does is make the process of discovery faster. But it's a tool in the same category as a calculator.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#66

Post by jjk166 »

Anyone who thinks using wolfram alpha for math is cheating has never tried using it for non-trivial calculations. Yeah, it will save you the time of looking up an integral from a table, but it's worthless if the integral isn't in a standard table. It will save you time on looking up the equation for the area of a dodecagon, but it won't prove that equation. It will save you time figuring out the units of the final answer, but it won't tell you if those units are logical. Wolfram alpha only saves people from the tedious busywork of basic arithmetic and algebra, the user still needs to do all the math.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#67

Post by neutralid »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #32
wodenokoto wrote: post #6

It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field. Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this. What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess.

I remember letting wolfram|Alpha solve some problems, then reading the steps it took to get there. They weren't always the most "human" approaches, but there was something to learn from it as well. Poor-man's (student) tutor.

If you know how to formulate the problem well (which is typically half the problem anyway), Mathematica is great for providing closed-form solutions, if there is one. In CS graduate school, it would provide general closed-form solutions that I'd never have thought of. Most everyone else brute-forced a solution numerically or simplified the problem to specific cases, which is fine but you get so much more insight from the general analytical solution, if one exists.

Re: Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

#68

Post by adamnemecek »

roumenguha wrote: post #55
SteveCoast wrote: post #27

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign. I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of s…

To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator can do, you can do, and just as fast. And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and she started at the board solving the same thing. She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.

> She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.

This is more of an interface problem I believe.

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