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Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

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Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#41

Post by emilecantin »

coding123 wrote: post #15

Do you all hear that? What is it? It's the fond-memory train coming to this thread. A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pon…

I started programming on a TI-82; I was making programs for basically every formula we had in math. My proudest accomplishment was a program for studying the unit circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle), all in TI-BASIC.

I later got a TI-89, you could program this one in C. I eventually made a darts game on in, complete with a two-player mode, and a single-player mode against an 'AI' with various difficulty levels.

This is basically what made me end up in this career.

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#42

Post by eloisant »

peatmoss wrote: post #9

Related story (the author describing the TI monopoly jogged my memory): I am part of the generation that was required to buy a big blue or black graphing calculator. As a high schooler I was indignant that we were being told to buy from just one company. So, based on reviews posted in a variety of online forums, I bought an HP-48 instead of the specified TI. After telling all my friends that my new calculator was goi…

In France TI and Casio were pretty much neck-to-neck. And the occasional weird guy with his HP-48.

So it wasn't a monopoly, more like a duopoly.

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#45

Post by tony101 »

jordigh wrote: post #33

So, why aren't they just phone apps these days? I mean, I understand why education wants these calculators, to control the students during tests. But after you leave school, why haven't calculator phone apps taken their place? Or is it because that once you leave school and you really need to do calculations, you turn to R, Matlab, or Python instead? Also, I'm surprised nobody has quoted xkcd yet: https://xkcd.com/76…

Wabbitemu allows you to emulate certain TI calculators (including the TI-84) on your Android device.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#46

Post by adrianN »

jerf wrote: post #3

Going digital would have some other advantages too. It would be easy to make a staged calculator where buttons only appear as you learn how to use them, for instance, so you don't stick a calculator in an Algebra II student's face that has stuff for calculus on it, which only contributes to the mystique of "math being hard". For a specialist who uses physical calculators all the time for serious computations, the adv…

It might just be me, but I read up on the buttons that I didn't understand yet. Some of them were really useful shortcuts that I wasn't supposed to know about.

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#47

Post by theandrewbailey »

samfisher83 wrote: post #39

I think one of the reasons why many teachers prefer the old ti83 it is because it isn't online. They don't want people cheating. Some classes you could only have a basic scientific calculator. In a lot of my college classes they just didn't let you use a graphing calculator since you could put a notes in there. Some classes just banned calculators. I just have a hard time believe schools and teachers will allow inter…

Did you even read down to the part about the SAT and ACT?

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#48

Post by hcrisp »

coding123 wrote: post #15

Do you all hear that? What is it? It's the fond-memory train coming to this thread. A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pon…

I had a TI-85, and because it only had 2D plotting while the TI-89 had 3D plotting, I decided to write my own 3D plotting program. I allowed the user to input a 3D equation, and then it would draw a mesh using trig to project it from isometric 3D to 2D and render it on the screen.

It was very slow, but it worked! I even used it for one of my calculus classes. It made very pretty graphics. I later ported the algorithm to Visual Basic just for kicks, and it ran a lot faster on a PC. In the process I learned a ton about programming and trig.

Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending

#49

Post by bpicolo »

niftich wrote: post #31

Contrary to what the article offhandedly suggests ("there are some drawbacks to using an online calculator on tests -- it's trickier to spot cheating, for example"), I'd wager an online-only service can be locked down in ways that the TIs couldn't be, and with considerably less manual effort. A common practice before standardized exams was resetting the RAM and the Archive, and deleting Apps; some school districts ev…

`I'd wager an online-only service can be locked down in ways that the TIs couldn't be, and with considerably less manual effort.`

But they have to either provide fully-locked-down computers or somehow lock student computers down otherwise. That sounds hard or expensive, too.

If schools adopt chromebooks like mad, could work?

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