HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE ALGEBRATOR?
Have you ever bought two hamburgers and a cheese burger and the cashier told you the total, but you only know the price of the hamburger? How are you going to split the price between you and your friends? Simple situations like this are solvable by algebra, total price minus twice the price of hamburgers equals x (price of cheeseburger). However, unlike arithmetic that you can count with fingers or answer using calculators, algebra on deeper problems don’t have calculators.
There is no substitute in learning how to solve, transpositions(addition property of equality), what you do to left you do to right and all those rules. But just in case you are not well versed, or you have a son or a daughter whose homeworks you can’t actually attend to at the moment, there is algebratorTM. It is a windows software that you purchase and install, there is a free version though, with some functionality limitations. So what does it do? It goes far more than your typical calculator, you insert an equation and you can ask it to solve for the missing value, then it gets the job done. But it doesn’t stop there, you can actually ask it, like your good seatmate when you were in high school how did it come up with the answer? And it will answer you in detail, step by step which you can actually reverse or fastforward. And it covers from LCM and GCF to linear algebra, matrix inverse and determinants! They even have a tagline: “you type in your algebra problem and algebrator does the rest”. But you shouldn’t do the resting, pun intended.
The software has been there all along since 1990s, but it was not so popular compared to winamp, Microsoft Office, and even Microsoft Paint, probably because though math is every day and everywhere not many people finds solving algebra problems enjoyable. Some teachers actually dismissed the idea, citing the possibility of students using it to cheat. They perceived that if the students would learn they might actually not try to learn and just depend on the software. However, just like any other good things, algebrator can be used for the benefit or otherwise. Algebrator is a tool, when used together with passion for learning, or proper guidance, there is no other end but benefit.
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The author is Teacher III at Marcelo H. Del Pilar National High School