When my high school graduating niece wanted to factor some polynomial expressions, I simply told her to fire up her browser and visit http://www.wolframalpha.com and type say ( I have forgotten here original expression) x^3 - y^3. Here are snapshots of parts of the screen output of the comptuational service.
Doubtless, she may not understand what a contour map is at the moment, but the factoring of x^3 -y^3 is part of the output of the server. Integrals and derivatives are even shown!
Now that Wolframalpha is now better known since it was chosen as the best of What's new for 2009 by Popular Science, smart students now have a semiautomated servant in the Internet to help them in their homework.
Wolframalpha will benefit students and their teachers in the college calculus programs. It can display the steps to some of the results, and the fine resolution graphs is more than ice candy. Wolfram alpha deserves more use.
Note: Our Python computational server is idle at the moment. It differs from Wolframalpha in that the latter is very general in scope from stock market questions, to historical significance of dates and has a nice formatted series of outputs.
So you know now one of our secret weapons. Narrow focused "free" solvers say for calculus include wxMaxima and Axiom to name just two.
Enjoy exploring the capabilities of Wolframalpha. Our concern is whether it will continue to be free in the far future.
There is no need to buy an expensive TI-89 or HP 50G unless the instructor absolutely require them. The problem is that in the PHilippines , Internet access is only enjoyed by so few especially in urban areas. Perhaps cell phones, and USB broadband devices can help accelerate the Internet access of the general population. And they will discover a host of currently free, awesome services like wolframalpha.
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