I think the only thing I learned in four years of high school math was how to screw around and graph functions on a TI-83. Aside from how to use the calculator, we didn't cover anything that wasn't in the Saxon Algebra 1 book between 8th grade and 12th grade AP Calculus. What a waste of so many hours...
Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
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Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#72No, it's not.
I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can.
It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons.
Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly.
As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there.
On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load.
TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#73Do 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…
So many memories of using the AXE parser for the TI. It's a gaming engine that compiles code to assembly, and it's probably at least 10-20 times faster than TI BASIC. Anyway, I've made a two calculator pong using that engine, and the network commands are quite simple with AXE! I managed to combine the server and client into one program that auto configured on startup. Making games with my friend was what really pushed me into computer science. Here's a link for the parser if you're interested.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers aren't always available. Computers aren't as portable (though phones are as portable as these calculators). The tactile feedback of a calculator beats phones (for me) in the same way that a physical keyboard's feedback better enables touch typing compared to an on-screen keyboard. Computers don't lend themselves to being quickly pulled out in meetings for quick computations. Phones are a better alternative…
Add in RPN id buy on in a flash - time for a kickstarter :-)
If I were a hardware guy I'd seriously consider it. In a couple months I should have the time to prototype it, but that's about as far as I can get. My time is stretched very thin these days.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#75Schools are still stuck in the past in regard to "cheating".
I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year.
In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students of the future to take a test without that digital link to everyone and everything is like teaching someone to juggle, and then making them tie one hand to the opposite foot for the test.
It's ridiculous--almost like asking algorithmic questions for the whiteboard interview. No, I didn't memorize forever the big-O for eight different sorting algorithms, because I have been using Internet search engines since AltaVista, and card catalogs and textbook indexes before that. The era when someone had to become his own information library, with comprehensive index, to be good at his job has been over for a long, long time.
So I think the burden is on teachers and testers to devise new methods of testing that make instant information lookup and collaboration entirely irrelevant to the methods of student evaluation. Make "cheating" an optional feature rather than a bug. I think in the short term that means that tests will have to be time-limited and questions will have to be procedurally generated, and unique to each test-taker. And further, the questions will have to be structured such that they can't be solved by just copy-pasting them into a search box.
I recall how I programmed my TI-85 to show "Mem cleared Defaults set" before my exams. It wasn't because I wanted to cheat, but because I didn't want to lose the other programs I wrote just because some teacher didn't trust me. Obviously, someone else could have easily done the same to protect a crib sheet or answer key. When your school system mandates that every student have the same calculators, that type of cheat only becomes more common. The teachers that wrote their exams as "open textbook" never needed to worry about crib sheets. They wouldn't care if you memorized the image of the required pages, or just the page numbers, or just the index key, so long as you could get the correct answers before the end of class.
The tests I took in school are obsolete. No school should be trying to extend their lifespan by creating administrative calculator monopolies and arbitrarily blocking newer technologies. Welcome yourself to the 21st century and write better tests.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#76Schools are still stuck in the past in regard to "cheating". I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year. In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students o…
I partly agree with you, a lot of tests (probably the majority) are bad tests. Many test on memorization rather than comprehension. But tests with a focus on comprehension are valuable evaluation tools, and access to the internet would break that without going to particularly contrived problem sets.
The purpose of an education is to understand the topics (language, math, science, art), not the tools (as in specific mechanical or informational aids). Making them (too) available during evaluations like exams and tests would only show that students were able to put something into Mathematica and get a result, not that they understood what they were doing.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#77So, 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…
If I need graphing, I'll go to my computer and use Mathematica or gnuplot.
Where a handheld calculator comes in handy is when doing something on paper that needs some arithmetic or trig/exp/log/roots. For that I find a physical calculator nicer than a phone calculator.
First, with the physical calculator it is easier to operate it without looking because of the physical buttons. Second, the physical calculator doesn't go to sleep as often and wakes up faster (and doesn't require authentication).
An example of a calculator that is almost perfect in my opinion is the HP-15C [1]. Note the dimensions: 128 × 79 × 15 mm (5" x 3.1" x 0.6"). This makes it small enough to work with even if you are working off on a sheet of letter-sized or A4 paper on a clipboard, or out of a spiral-bound notebook, and it easily fits in a shirt pocket.
In 2012 HP brought this back into production in a limited edition that sold for about $140. I grabbed one so that I would have two, since my original from 1982 can't last forever.
It should be possible to make a "calculator case" or "calculator overlay" for a phone that would put physical buttons for a calculator over the touch screen. There are materials that "conduct" touch. It should be possible to incorporate that into the button design so that when not pressed the touch conductive material not touching the screen, and when pressed fully it touches both the screen and the finger that is pressing the button.
Maybe even get fancy, and incorporate a small eInk display on each button to display the labels for the keys, and include an app that can change the labels to match the needs of whatever app you are using the buttons with.
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#78I'm heartily glad that I went to school before calculators were available. As far as I can see they are just a distraction. How is a calculator useful for learning calculus?
Re: Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much anyone working non trivially in STEM fields would find a physical calculator usefull - Acountants would be another group. Which reminds me I must see if I can get a replacement battery for my old HP RPN Calculator
I do think people are not quite understanding that when I say "niche within a niche", I do that with the understanding that it does in fact exist. Had I meant to say "nobody", I would have said that. But it is a niche within a niche. STEM is certainly way to expansive; I'm STEM and I haven't had a use for a calculator since high schools were mandating them. It's certainly a niche within STEM, which is a niche. And th…
as the standard calculators on pc's are basic 4 function ones do you not have to use any of the scientific functions log sin cos tan et al.
If your working in it having a hex octal / binary conversions can be usfull