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Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

thehustle.co

11–20 of 460 posts

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#11
I am not a fan of the lobbying side of this story, but I do think that the TI graphing calculators are good products. They are very durable and easy to use. I fondly remember programming a multiplayer poker game in TI-BASIC on a road trip complete with a CPU player! I also would browse TIcalc.org to look for new games and utilities.

I later bought a TI-89 Titanium which opened up the gaming possibilities! Check out square-z for a fun tetris-like game

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#12
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

> no ability to store notes

What? It can run custom programs. Of course it can store notes.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#13
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

>no ability to store notes

You can still type in programs, right? I remember kids storing a bunch of notes that way.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#14
post #12
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

> no ability to store notes What? It can run custom programs. Of course it can store notes.

That's why I said "easily". Yeah you can store programs, but they're really hard to write, and most test proctors know how to clear the memory on a TI calculator, which they require you to do before a test.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#15
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

You can trivially store notes on the TI graphic calculator using it's built in programming function. This is not a new trick to any student. Common test setup is to have each student reset their calculator to factory settings to account for this.

Internet access is possible but significantly non-trivial on most models.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#16
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

You can easily store notes on a TI calculator. I had a TI-85 in college, and was occasionally guilty of writing TI-BASIC programs to make tests easier (for example, I had one which computed Euler's method).

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#17
post #13
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

>no ability to store notes You can still type in programs, right? I remember kids storing a bunch of notes that way.

Yes, but most test proctors make you clear the memory before the test.

In fact, one of the programs my friends and I wrote was one that faked the memory clearing process. This worked because at the time the test proctors didn't really know how the calculator worked so our fake was good enough.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#18
Interesting that the TI-84 is mentioned so much. I am pretty sure this article is making a big deal out of nothing. I think this is a case of journalists reading "graphing calculator" and assuming the 84 is being used. SAT's allow CAS calculators, the Inspire is a pretty impressive specialist calculator and makes algebraic expressions incredibly easy. Any sensible student should be taking one into the exam or they're just putting themselves at a disadvantage. I can't speak for what calculator students ARE buying, but they are allowed to buy and use far better ones, the 84 might be overpriced but just don't buy it. You wouldn't care if the Apple II is currently overpriced, no one should be using one, so it shouldn't be a big deal that the 84 is overpriced, just move on.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#19
post #7

This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…

> no ability to store notes

I thought that storing notes was the selling point of the TI-93. You can easily add an app that does just that.

Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

#20
post #8
post #2

Approximately related, I find the NumWorks calculator [1] absolutely enthralling. It has a fairly beefy modern ARM Cortex M4 processor which runs an attractive GUI written in Python. And yes, you can write and run Python on the device. The hardware is very well described [2] in human terms and electrical schematics are available. Software is totally open source and the device can be easily reflashed. I'm not sure wha…

It's a great project, but it isn't Open Source (and definitely isn't Free Software) due to the NonCommercial restriction on its license. Creative Commons recommend against using their licenses, including NC-SA, for software - https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

Yes, this came up before as well. It was a fine distinction that I wasn't aware of.
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