When I was in year 12, 15 years ago, my math teacher introduced our class to a website called "Wolfram's Integrator" which could simplify complicated integrals

When I was in year 12, 15 years ago, my math teacher introduced our class to a website called "Wolfram's Integrator" which could simplify complicated integrals automatically for you. I just googled it and it still exists: http://www.wolframalpha.com/calculators/integral-calculator/?redirected=true http://www.wolframalpha.com/calculators/integral-calculator/... At the time I thought it was pretty cool in a passing trivia kind of way but didn't make much use of it. A year after that I was a first year university student all of our linear algebra tutorials were taught in the labs using a computer program called "Maple". I really struggled to wrap my head around it. I didn't do well in the class until I started writing out the problems myself and solving them on paper. I found at least for me personally that inputting problems into a computer and having it spit the answer out wasn't teaching me anything (besides which functions to call), in other words I was learning the programming language and not the underlying concepts. Nowadays I work with FEA and LP solvers and I rely on computer assistance all the time to do my job. I'd like to think having a firm grasp of the underlying math is advantageous and makes me a better engineer but I know there are people around that get by just by "plugging things into Ansys".