The influential company providing brainpower for the iPhone personal assistant, Siri, has joined the group of education firms debuting new products around the time of Apple’s entry into the e-textbook market.
Wolfram Research, whose Wolfram Alpha engine provides Siri’s fact-finding abilities, unveiled its Wolfram Education Portal yesterday. The new site brings Wolfram’s learning tools and teaching resources together under one tent. It includes an interactive textbook, lesson plans, and demonstrations created with Mathematica, the company’s computing software. Course materials for algebra and calculus have already been posted, with more soon to come.
Students who are working on a problem can click on “hot spots,” which will take them to Wolfram Alpha’s site for the solution and an explanation, according to Crystal Fantry, a senior educational outreach specialist at Wolfram Research. Ms. Fantry added that the demonstrations section allows students to work on visual representations of problems by sliding bars and clicking on boxes.
“That’s a very easy way for students to hands-on understand a concept,” she said.
Wolfram’s new site arrives during a week full of educational-technology announcements. Yesterday, the e-textbook rental company Chegg showed off a new e-reader that allows students to read texts on any device. The browser-based reader is powered by HTML5, and it will let students highlight text, add notes, and ask questions of fellow readers as they go along. Wolfram’s portal, Ms. Fantry said, will evolve to include problem generators for practice and videos.
Students will have to register for a free account to access the material, though Ms. Fantry said the company might create a subscription model after the portal is officially released (the site is now in beta). Visitors also need to download a copy of Wolfram’s document-player software to see the content.
As for the fortuitous timing of the site’s introduction, which took place on the eve of Apple’s big event, Ms. Fantry said it was a fluke and not part of Wolfram’s strategy.
“It just happened to be a happy coincidence that both were released very close to each other,” she said.
