Downloading cognition

My fifth grade students must be studying square roots in math class (I wonder what happened to the plan that their content teachers were going to share with me-- a lowly "special" teacher--what they were studying so that I could find connections to their content and computers). They came in today and were asking about the square roots.

One student thought she could stump the old math teacher with "what is the square root of 144?" The they started asking about the square root of pi... the old math teacher said "let's see... more than one, less than two." They were unimpressed, but we quickly went to Siri on the iPhone.

After she gave us direction to two nearby restaurants that serve pie, we got the WolframAlpha page and found the value of the square root of pi. That led us to a discussion of the need to know how to find such numbers today. If we all have devices that allow us to quickly do such calculations, why don't we simply use the technology (make that learn how to use the technology well) and then think about the meaning of such calculations and the problems to which we can apply such calculations?