What is it called?

I found an interesting article that related to a problem that came up in one of my classes recently. Students mentioned that sometimes they didn't know what an item was called in English, and they didn't know how to find out. This lead to the realization that this also happens in their own language.

The article I found is called, How to Google Something You Don't Know How to Describe. I had intended for students to read it and see that the author had the problem of now knowing what certain items were called in English - his own language.The article includes some pictures as examples, so I showed them to students to see what they were called in their own language. Since they didn't know, this started an interesting discussion of how they could find out.

Link to the article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/how-to-google-something-you-dont-know-how-to-describe/387889/

The article mentions a number of websites for this purpose:

• What is this thing called: http://whatisthisthingcalled.com/
• Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/
• Superfish: http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/
• Quora: http://www.quora.com/

The students became interested in checking these websites, in particular the first one. People post pictures of an item and ask users if they know what it is and what it is used for. My students thought it would be a good idea to use this for various pieces of equipment used in technology fields as a way of learning what it is called and what it does.

I told them to let the group know if they find other ways of learning what something is called, so we could start a bank of ideas. I think the websites themselves are also useful for further reference work that students might need in their studies and future careers.