Every two weeks from June through August, we will continue to post challenging word problems and accept solutions to them. We encourage teachers with class, school, or district memberships to design summer projects that draw on Current Problems or past PoWs, such as the selection from the Problems of the Week Library highlighted in our May 15th issue:

http://mathforum.org/electronic.newsletter/mf.intnews14.20.html

We will have only a few volunteers doing mentoring; and our responses will otherwise be scaled back as we get ready for a new series of problems at the end of August.

Trial Class Accounts are available:

http://mathforum.org/products/

• life expectancy France 1910
• _al__la__ [Crosswords: find words matching that pattern]
• St. Louis Cardinals hits
• second cousin once removed
• mortgage
• area Ukraine
• Michigan lottery
• 8_1 knot
• third Tuesday in April
• San Francisco to Tokyo
• sounds like Rubin
• integer partitions of 10

In short, you should be able to query Alpha about "essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge," with particular strengths in "areas where computation or mathematics have traditionally had a more significant role, or where knowledge is more readily quantitative."

Maria Andersen, whose Teaching College Math blog we have previously featured here, has two recent posts on Wolfram|Alpha. One gives examples you can use to explore the power of the engine:

http://teachingcollegemath.com/?p=1019

The other discusses her views of its possible impact on math education at the college level:

http://teachingcollegemath.com/?p=998

Wolfram Education Portal

http://www.wolfram.com/edu/

Wolfram has developed this portal as a way to access their precollege Demonstrations by grade level and subject, as well as by searching. The site offers help and related resources:

The Handley Math Page