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

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

#251

Post by grawprog »

jedberg wrote: 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…

Every test I took in school, including university, forbid graphing calculators during tests, except for any that were about actual graphing. During those, as you said they went around and cleared the memory on everyone's calculator.

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

#252

Post by Invictus0 »

zaphodbeblebrox wrote: post #243
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted." At this point in 2019, with such cheap computation, the school calculator lines are being sold as much on what they don't do as what they do. Around 1994 or 1995, I had an HP-48G calculator, a real scientific programmable calculator meant for engineers and scientists, where the rest of the class had the TI line of school calculators. The HP-48G could…

Approved calculators on the SAT[1] include the TI-Nspire CAS, which can do symbolic integration, among other things. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...

There is no calculus on the SAT.

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

#253

Post by willis936 »

jmcphers wrote: post #16
jedberg wrote: 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).

I did this in emag instead of bothering with the grad, curl, laplacian, and spherical coordinate conversion by hand. I did them by hand in vector calc. All I’d be doing by doing it by hand is introducing room for error.

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

#254

Post by jacobolus »

thayne wrote: post #236
vkou wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we considered the radical option of, you know, not allowing calculators on tests? And not writing tests that rely on the use of a calculator?

For higher level math classes that means that the students have to spend more time doing mundane things like arithmetic and graphing rather than using the higher level skills they are being tested on.

“Higher-level math classes” do not need “mundane things like arithmetic” at all.

If there’s any appreciable quantity of arithmetic involved, that’s a clear sign that you aren’t dealing with a “higher-level math class”.

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

#255

Post by triceratops »

RandallBrown wrote: post #220
vkou wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. There's not a single operation that you learn between grades 7 and 12 that requires anything more than a scientific, non-graphic calculator to perform.

You don't think graphing equations is an important function for any math done by kids in grades 7-12?

Isn't that what graph paper is for?

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

#256

Post by jacobolus »

Eridrus wrote: post #163
jedberg wrote: 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…

Even if TI cannot be displaced, the amount of money they're extracting could be drastically reduced. The only time these calculators are actually needed is in exams - it should be pretty straightforward to let students use a TI clone app on their phones for regular study, and give them real ones only during exam time. This reduces the need from 1 per student, to 1 per students concurrently taking an exam.

This is already the case, and has been for decades. It is entirely possible to get through high school and undergraduate math/science education without ever owning a handheld graphing calculator, just borrowing one for the 1–2 exams which require them.

A “scientific calculator” (or for that matter a slide rule) is pretty much always sufficient in class, and a computer with a full keyboard and proper programming language (this could be a chromebook with a web browser, or a Raspberry Pi or used iPad with an external keyboard) is a better homework tool.

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

#257

Post by ransom1538 »

jmcphers wrote: post #16
jedberg wrote: 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).

Ugh. You miss the point. It is the internet that is the issue.

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

#258

Post by jacobolus »

singron wrote: post #146
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted." At this point in 2019, with such cheap computation, the school calculator lines are being sold as much on what they don't do as what they do. Around 1994 or 1995, I had an HP-48G calculator, a real scientific programmable calculator meant for engineers and scientists, where the rest of the class had the TI line of school calculators. The HP-48G could…

I used a TI-89 (which has a CAS) on the AP Calculus exam. I maybe used it to double check an answer, but I don't remember it being more useful than a TI-83 on that exam. You can only use calculators on part of the exam. On the calculator portion, I remember formulating each problem to be the hard part and the actual differentiation/integration was straightforward. The SAT math is so rudimentary that it's difficult to…

> On the calculator portion, I remember formulating each problem to be the hard part and the actual differentiation/integration was straightforward.

The hard part was by far typing complicated expressions into the stupid TI-83, navigating its terrible menu system, getting it to output what it was supposed to, and figuring out what was printed on the screen.

Coming up with the expressions to type took only a tiny fraction of the time of actually punching it in.

What a tremendous waste of students’ time and attention. Might just as well test emoji typing speed.

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

#259

Post by vkou »

RandallBrown wrote: post #220
vkou wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. There's not a single operation that you learn between grades 7 and 12 that requires anything more than a scientific, non-graphic calculator to perform.

You don't think graphing equations is an important function for any math done by kids in grades 7-12?

I think that knowing how to graph y = x^2 + x is a far more important skill than knowing how to punch it into a graphing calculator.

"Oh, it's a parabola... Plus a slanted line. It's going to look like a parabola for large, and small values of x, but it's going to have an odd behaviour around the origin, where x^2 ~=~ |x|. If I compute the approximate values of y, when x = -3, -2, -1, -0.75, -0.5, -0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 and 3, it's going to give me a great approximation of what the graph looks like."

Those values are, to a rough approximation, 6, 2, 0, -0.2, -0.25, -0.2, 0, 0.3, 0.75, 1.3, 2, 6, and 12.

Given that 'connect the dots' is part of the kindergarten curriculum, I don't think that connecting those data points should be that much of a challenge for the average grade 8 student.

Now, compare that to the 'skillset' of plugging the formula into a TI-83...

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

#260

Post by SkyMarshal »

notJim wrote: post #79
echelon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better solution is to have the school purchase all of the calculators and give them to students at the time of the exam. This also would align with driving costs down since schools will not want to pay $100 per calculator for their student body.

So then you'd have to use a calculator you've never used before during a high stakes exam? Doesn't sound good to me.

Not necessarily, presumably students would own the same version and use it during the year, but would have to use the school-owned ones for exams.
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