WolframAlpha: Complex Creativity and Innovation

The adoption last month of new Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics by the Ohio State Board of Education will be accompanied by revisions in social studies and science as the state works to implement a new series of assessments over the next several years.
 
Standards, however, may be hard pressed to keep pace with the potential of a revolutionary new web site, WolfamAlpha[1], that not only stores knowledge, but enables students and teachers to engage in computations that provide definitive answers to factual inquiries. Growing fast, WolframAlpha already contains over 10 trillion pieces of data, 50,000 algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for over 1000 domains. 
 

Wolfram on TED Talks, April 2010

The site is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram[2], the founder of Mathematica[3]the software that first began to integrate multiple aspects of technical computing into a single package in the 1980s. Mathematica is increasingly being adopted to K-12 as well as college settings to introduce real-world data and foster problem solving skills.
 
The creative and innovative potential of Mathematica can be seen at Wolfram Demonstration Project where educators can download a free version of the Mathematica7 player.