My Experience Using Wolfram Alpha

Pelangi Shafira Maharani

3115100101
 I was introduced with the website WolframAlpha by my friend when I was still in
high school, but I didn’t try using the app because I thought it was just a way to cheat on your
homework. When I finally got into university, my teacher, Pak Pujo, re-introduced me to the
world of WolframAlpha. He told the class that WolframAlpha was a very useful engine that
would be helpful with our studies, especially calculus.

For the definition of WolframAlpha, I’m going to put the definition that the
WolframAlpha website itself gave us: “WolframAlpha is an engine for computing answers
and providing knowledge. It works by using its vast store of expert-level knowledge and
algorithms to automatically answer questions, do analysis, and generate reports.”

From my point of view, WolframAlpha is a pretty amazing engine. It’s definitely

helpful for a lot of things. Personally, I think it’s like google, but on a more educated scale.
To use WolframAlpha, you only need to write what you want to know on the empty box
designed to be written with questions like the picture below.

At first I was pretty confused, because I wasn’t sure how was I supposed to use that
beside using it as a very smart calculator for my calculus problems. I tried a few things, and
found out about some sections we can explore. With WolframAlpha, you can ask a lot of
things. In example, you can ask about mathematics problems, history, physics, art, medicine,
even about something as complex as engineering.

Speaking of engineering, that topic is very close to my heart because I am a newly-

enrolled engineering student. I am pursuing civil engineering for my undergraduate studies,
but since I am still new with it, I have a very limited knowledge in how to use the
WolframAlpha to learn more about my civil engineering lessons. Because of that, I decided
to find out more about civil engineering.
 I did watch some videos on youtube, but they didn’t give me much. In the end I just
tried writing what I knew for sure about the civil engineering lessons, which was ‘cantilever
beam’ (because I really remember that part of the lesson) on the empty box. When I did, it
showed me a few information that we could fill.

When I faced the empty boxes above, I was actually thinking of using this to guide me
through my Statics homework, but because of my very, very limited knowledge (both in
filling the information and the language barrier), I was too confused to continue. I understand
what I need to fill for the force type, the force, the beam length, and the distance from end.
Even so, I don’t know what to make of the rest of them.

Honestly, it was very interesting because we could actually check the shear force
profile, the bending moment profile, the slope profile, and the deflection profile. Those are
one of the most difficult thing for me on Statics. If only I could understand more about what
to fill for information, I would be able to ace the class of Statics.
 Those were basically the only things I could do on WolframAlpha that had something
to do with my civil engineering lessons. Of course, we could use WolframAlpha to answer
the problems on Calculus. WolframAlpha is this big, fancy calculator that is connected to the
internet. Calculus was probably one of the easiest questions it could solve.

I tried a few problems I found on my calculus book that I was actually trying to do. To
be honest, I was very grateful for the explanation it gave me, because it wasn’t that easy. I
didn’t know a lot of things and it answered a lot of questions I had about that subject with an
outstanding explanation. Calculus was solved, just like that, by using WolframAlpha. The
picture below is an actual problem I found on my textbook, and the answer that was given by
WolframAlpha was very helpful for me. I ended up understanding the problem.
 Of course, Pak Pujo doesn’t have to worry that we aren’t going to use WolframAlpha
properly. From my very own experience, I used WolframAlpha only when I had zero
understanding in what I was doing, and even when it answered my question, I only looked at
the explanation to learn more about it. Obviolusly, I got things done a lot quicker and myself
a little smarter than before.

Anyway, because Pak Pujo said we weren’t obligated to use WolframAlpha for a civil
engineering-related project and because my cantilever search was very dissatisfying, I
decided to use WolframAlpha to help me with my English. I like writing and reading in
English, but because it isn’t my native language, I have a lot of troubles whenever I try to
actually write or read something in English.

For me, WolframAlpha and literature worked together and made some kind of
dictionary. I read a book that was written in English and got confused because of the lack of
vocabularies I actually have, so I went to WolframAlpha to find out what was the meaning. It
was very helpful, and I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge from just using the engine.
The picture below will show you how to use WolframAlpha as a portable dictionary. Learn as
you go, because I guess that is the way to save time.

As for writing, WolframAlpha also helped, although not as much as it helped my

reading. I went to WolframAlpha to look for synonyms, antonyms, and acronyms, which
actually made my vocabularies grow. I don’t usually do that, but now that I know how it feels
to use WolframAlpha to help my writing, I think I’m gonna do things that way a lot more. I
really recommend WolframAlpha to people who want to learn more English. The picture
below will show you an example of how you use WolframAlpha to enrich your vocabularies.
 Using WolframAlpha had been a pleasure, and writing this report made me use more
of my knowledge in English. I completely realize that my English is far from perfect, but I
hope that Pak Pujo will understand what I had been trying to convey. I’m sorry for all the
grammar mistakes, and I hope you are pleased with how my report of my experience when I
used WolframAlpha turned out. Thank you.