311–320 of 460 posts
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Cheat-sheets are also far more "real world" than the fake environment many schools cling to. I don't know a single practicing engineer that doesn't have a note scribbled somewhere. My engineering school recognized this decades ago and adjusted accordingly. Now the math department? They were a different story. No calculators. Period. Ever. Made higher-level calculus... interesting. Thankfully I'd already had it in hig…
> Now the math department? They were a different story. No calculators. Period. Ever. Made higher-level calculus... interesting. There is no reason for any math course at any level to ever need a calculator, period. The point of math courses is learning to think, not learning to avoid fat-fingering tiny buttons or learning the specific crappy interface of some anachronistic antique machine. Without an electronic calc…
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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.
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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.
I'm having trouble figuring out what type of material in Computer Science would require a calculator.
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The HP Prime calc has these features, has been out for years, is FAR, FAR more powerful than any TI calc I know of, including the newer CAS models, has top-facing LEDs so the teacher can know that you're in test mode at a glance, costs (and is worth) $125 or so, and has never taken off at all.
> and has never taken off at all. Nor have any of TI's attempts at replacing the TI-83 series, like the TI-Nspire. (Which even had a TI-83 emulation mode!)
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…
Can you say more about this please? What is a proctor, and why don't they like notes?
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That is an argument against allowing phone apps. But doesn't excuse requiring students to pay $100+ for antiquated technology.
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?
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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…
> 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.
FWIW, this was almost completely useless to me in visualizing the parabola. If I was doing this by hand, it's easy to find the roots and glance at the leading coefficient to figure out what it'll look like.