I am genuinely impressed how capitalism can solve a problem that never existed before they started solving it and then forcing that particular and often quite expensive solution on you.
Never needed calculator until advanced statistics where calculations became monotonous and no longer instructive. Before that, actually, use of calculators was explicitly banned both in school and uni.
Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
81–90 of 460 posts
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#82Timely thing - I actually dusted off my TI-89 over the weekend doing taxes. There was something about a focused tool with a physical number that I was really desiring. I have fond memories of tapping around on it in high school. Turns out it sucks, and I wound up just buying one of the $5 solar basic calculators and was way happier. I can't wait for this monopoly to get blown up.
Opposite story here... I still use my TI-89 (or my even older TI-86) from time to time, even when sitting in front of a PC that has R, Maxima, Gnuplot, Axiom, Sage, etc. installed. There is something about the format of those old TI calculators that I find oddly appealing for whatever reason.
That said, when I don't have a hand-held calculator handy, I usually just fire up bc or R when I need to do some quick calculations.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#83It's a shame we've standardized on something so ancient and limited, but we'll be losing something when we give up on the standardization we've achieved. At least if we accept that basic graphing capability is crucial to high school and undergrad maths. I'm picturing a high school math teacher trying to support 20-30 kids running 20-30 different BYOD'd devices... multiplied by 5-6 periods of teaching per day. Even if…
That's why standards shouldn't focus on the device and model number, but on minimum capabilities and user interface. So even if a given calculator supports various other functionality and advanced programmability, as long as you can switch it into a "standard UI" mode (which defines what various buttons do, the programming language, screen output, etc) then there shouldn't be a problem For test taking, you can even a…
As other commenters have pointed out, it's as much about limiting the capabilities of these devices as it is about anything else.
Teachers don't want students to have unlimited power to solve equations, etc. They want students to do some of these things manually, for learning purposes. You don't necessarily want your students using whatever top-of-the-line devices/software that can make some of the coursework utterly trivial.
Is this solvable in software? Sure!
Students could run tablets running approved calculator software, and teachers could disable/enable features at-will at test time. This would of course rely upon students running some sort of verified software/hardware combo.
Has anybody solved this particular challenge yet? Not to my knowledge. I think they may need to think about this, if they want to unseat the TI (a worthy goal)
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#84Casio makes several graphing calculators that are cheaper and faster than the TIs. $70 gets you the top color one that can run Python programs and is test compliant - it has a flashing test mode that disables all user memory. But the $35 b&w one works just as well for tests. So low income parents can get a good graphing calculator that does it all for around 1/4 the price of the recommended TIs. Students fear Casio b…
i wont claim to be a serious badass, but taking these exams without a calculator is very doable when you consider how the questions are scored. I forgot my calculator for ap phys C and just left all my answers in symbolic form without numerically evaluating them. If your steps are correct you get the vast majority of the credit regardless
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#85Interesting 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…
If what you are saying is true, then there is no way that TI would be able to maintain a $100+ price point on a $25 calculator. So that itself is evidence that the TI-84 is a requirement in many student situations. Even if something else can be used on exams, if you don't have the calculator that the text books are written to, or that the teacher knows how to teach against, you are at a major disadvantage.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#86I feel really out of the loop here. I went through a pretty standard curriculum in the 2000s and have never owned or used a graphing calculator (aside from the few times the teacher demonstrated our school's TI-83s in class in high school). What are they used for? [And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and o…
> I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with
That's the key. There's two schools of thought that have their pros and cons. 1) using magic number means no calculator, but students can get by searching for clean answers and might not truly understand the topic. 2) using real world examples grounds the curriculum in reality so there isn't a gap applying it, and you're not used to the cleanliness in the future, but might be a bit opaque in the short term.
Both sides have pretty good arguments why they do better than the other teaching a number sense to students about the various transformations.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#87TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti-trust investigation. There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted.
I believe that they dictate specific models so that the proctors can learn in advance how to verify that the calculator is not being used to bring in outside notes.
It's unreasonable to only allow models from one manufacturer, but dictating specific models for each allowed manufacturer is not unreasonable.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most test proctors make you clear your memory before a test in high school. In college they don't care as much because they are used to making "open book tests".
The trick with those is you can make a TI-BASIC program that will make it look like you cleared the memory - fake empty "programs" list and all. There were a few tiny details you couldn't replicate like the highlighting animation, but they never noticed when I did it.
I did this.
Oddly enough in a computer science class we had an old professor. He accused me of cheating. He was right. However, he physically inspected my calculator like under the cover and where batteries are lol but did not check the programs. He apologized. I did well on the test.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most test proctors make you clear your memory before a test in high school. In college they don't care as much because they are used to making "open book tests".
There was the little known, but powerful combo called "GROUP" and "ARCHIVE". GROUP allowed you to package together a set of programs. Archive would allow you to take that group and store it in the long term memory of the calculator. You can then "clear the memory" of the calculator, but can then immediately unarchive the grouped programs and get everything back how it was. That said, I don't recall my teachers ever g…
Plus you probably learn more coding the algorithm into a calculator than you would learn regurgitating something from memory. That's a win either way.
Re: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
#90Casio makes several graphing calculators that are cheaper and faster than the TIs. $70 gets you the top color one that can run Python programs and is test compliant - it has a flashing test mode that disables all user memory. But the $35 b&w one works just as well for tests. So low income parents can get a good graphing calculator that does it all for around 1/4 the price of the recommended TIs. Students fear Casio b…
i wont claim to be a serious badass, but taking these exams without a calculator is very doable when you consider how the questions are scored. I forgot my calculator for ap phys C and just left all my answers in symbolic form without numerically evaluating them. If your steps are correct you get the vast majority of the credit regardless
For one of my college trig class, there was at least one test that was "no calculator allowed". In this case, all the answers were symbolic, or used specific angles that had results that you can write out using whole numbers (or at least whole numbers under the sqrt symbol).
I asked the instructor, and was allowed to use a slide rule, however (my trusty Picket N1010-ES)