NOT BASEBALL

Like most of my best blog ideas this one is completely stolen from a colleague.  (He can let me know if he wants credit here for directing me to the widgets).   I learned that Wolfram|Alpha has an easy template to allow you to make widgets on their site.

The widget you will see at the bottom of the post was developed from Wolfram|Alpha’s widget developer.  It took ten minutes to make including watching the first half of a 7 minute video explaining how to make a widget.  At first I was unsure how to start, but after seeing a couple steps on the video I realized that the interface was really easy to use.

I will probably not use Javascript to make calculators on my web pages anymore- at least until Wolfram|Alpha starts charging.  In addition to using this for my classes I can also use this for publishing projects to make calculators that will stay forever without relying on instructional programmers.  When I think how long it used to take to do similar projects with Scientific Notebook and other math products that frequently required plug ins on the user end it makes me thrilled with what Wolfram|Alpha can do.