Websites Any Math or Computer Science Practitioner Should Check Out
October 30, 2018
CRLSTime is a clock for showing the CRLS schedule during the school day, and it tells you what period it is, depending on whether you select lunch A, B, or C. It was made by the Computer Science Club and can be viewed on desktop or mobile. On iOS, you can also bookmark the site as a home screen icon by opening the website in Safari, tapping the share button, and tapping “Add to Home Screen.”
WolframAlpha can give you anything from the solution to a math equation to information about The Hunger Games. It has an impressive body of knowledge about the world and about how to solve various problems that make it particularly useful. Just look at the examples, and you’ll be blown away at what it can do. That being said, it is good for well-defined problems with computable or definite answers, not open-ended or very obscure questions which do better with search engines and virtual assistants.
If you would like to write and run computer programs on your Chromebook, Repl.it is your best bet. Repl.it is a free online IDE (integrated development environment) that can run virtually all well-known programming languages. You don’t even need to sign up to use it, and you can also install packages with it. This is a big selling point because I could find no online environment like it that lets me use the Python machine learning library Scikit-learn.
You probably already know about the online graphing calculator Desmos. Its unmatched ease of use and interactivity sets this online graphing calculator apart from the rest. Not only can you instantly visualize equations and functions, but you can also make scatter plots; just get two columns of tab-separated values from a spreadsheet, and paste them into Desmos. Afterward, Desmos can instantly perform a regression on it: just type in an equation in the form of y = a + bx to fit a linear regression line to the data. What I love about it is that you can give it any other arbitrary equation as well—polynomials of any degree, logistic, and even sine.
If you want a quick and easy way to visualize your data without any unnecessary features, this is for you. Also check out Shodor Simple Plot and the Acula statistics calculator.
This piece also appears in our October 2018 print edition.
