Wolfram Alpha has launched.  Wolfram has coupled the symbolic and computational math power of their Mathematica software to an extensive collection of curated databases, on topics ranging from chemistry to socioeconomic data to sports statistics.

While the ability to do your high school math homework has some people either very happy or very worried, I’m much more interested in using it to access meaningful data in a way that I could use in a math classroom.  A one-step resource for good data coupled with the ability to easily do computations could be fantastic for bringing real-world problems into a math class, or for student-driven projects.

So with that in mind I’ve been poking around at what sort of data and data analysis can be extracted from Alpha.  The results are promising, but still a bit clumsy.

Playing around with socioeconomic data seemed promising.  But then I tried to ask for the standard deviation of GNP.  Alpha completely failed to understand that I meant the set of all GNP data by country, and instead thought I was asking for the SD of a single value for the total world GNP.  Is there a way around this?

Another weird oddity was looking at the country data for Canada, specifically the results for languages.  English and French are obvious enough, but Plautdietsch at third place nationally?  I like my vereniki and farmer sausage as much as the next Mennonite-farming-immigrant-descendant, but Stats Canada shows Chinese at third place as of 2001 with 2.9% of the population.  In fact, the results seem to miss not only all Asian languages, but all European ones other than English, French, and the oddball Germanic mix.

It looks like a great math tool to have on hand, but with data this rough around the edges it’s hard for me to simply take “Wolfram|Alpha Curated Data” seriously as a primary source just yet.

For the last few months I’ve been busy in a B.Ed degree program at Simon Fraser University.  It’s a 12-month, second degree program, so come next January I will be officially marked as insane enough to want to teach high school kids.

This blog sort of formed out of a desire to learn more about game design.  I still like overanalyzing games that I play, and I still poke around a little at small freeware game development every now and then.  But overall it’s no longer the foremost thing on my mind worth talking about.  So I’m re-generalizing this space to write about whatever I need to get off my mind in a way that I think could be worth reading.

On the other hand, I’m also signed up for Ian Schreiber’s Game Design Concepts summer course that he is excellently offering for free.  I’ve tried my hand at teaching game design myself briefly; it went okay, but had all the rough edges you’d expect from a new course taught by a new teacher who was making up a new curriculum.  I don’t know if I’ll go back to trying to offer a standalone course in that way again, but I suspect I may integrate game design basics into high school IT courses if there’s enough interest in basic game development as, say, a project option.  So I may end up blabbing about game design a bit more, but in a shifting context of integrating it into my teaching practice rather than as an aspiring indie developer.