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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?

#321

Post by avhon1 »

copperx wrote: post #19
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…

> 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.

The TI-93 is typically not required for high-school or undergraduate math classes, and is often not allowed on standardized tests.

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

#322

Post by ilaksh »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #160

> The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into classroom curricula. It sought approval for standardized test use from administrators like the College Board. And every time a competing tech innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola. Absolutely disgusting

I think that instead of disgust we should react with lawsuits and prison terms.

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

#323

Post by avhon1 »

jacobolus wrote: post #258
singron wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frac…

Funny, that was never my impression of the TI-83. In each menu, every item is numbered, and you can just hit the number to enter the corresponding item. I don't think there's anything that requires more than 5 button presses, and most of the common things can be gotten in 3.

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

#325

Post by reilly3000 »

ChickeNES wrote: post #122
sct202 wrote: post #33

How is there not a giant 2nd hand marketplace of TI graphing calculators for super cheap? Like after 30 years of basically producing a functionally identical product that few people need after college, there should be cheap used graphing calculators everywhere.

Agreed, I've picked up 83's and 84's for less than $10, and have seen many more at pawn shops and thrift stores

Case in point, I picked up a TI 83Plus for my son who was going into 7th grade this summer for $10 at Goodwill. It is in fine condition. It turns out that it isn't required, but I'm glad I did: he keeps it on his bed stand and tinkers with scripts at night. Its the one screen I won't regulate for him.

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

#326

Post by j45 »

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…

Ti calculators very easily store notes.

You save the name of the program in a certain format and it becomes an invisible file.

Add to this building your own apps to calculate common algebra, chemistry, etc. My high school allowed apps as long as we wrote it from scratch and were willing to risk our grades on it.

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

#327

Post by reilly3000 »

westurner wrote: post #242

For $100, you can buy a Pinebook with an 11" or 14" screen, a multitouch trackpad, gigabytes of storage, WiFi, a keyboard without a numpad, and an ARM processor. On this machine, you can create reproducible analyses with JupyterLab; do arithmetic with Python; work with multidimensional arrays with NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, xarray, Dask; do machine learning with Statsmodels, Scikit-learn, Dask-ML, TPOT; create books of th…

I would LOVE to live in a world where Jupyter notebooks are the defacto standard for post-primary education. It would take some vision and leadership to bring about that sort of change, but would far better prepare kids for the world they will be running one day.

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

#328

Post by alexhutcheson »

lr4444lr wrote: post #188
znpy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The funny thing is to an extent, the performance of the student seems to be inversely proportional to the density of the cheat-sheet. This brings back the memory of the circuit theory exam. You could bring a cheatsheet but it was mostly useless. The test had very simple numbers (1, -1, 2, 1/2, -i or things like that) because the professor didn't want to be bothered checking complex formulas and the difficulty was m…

You could use the Matrix operations common on standard graphing calculator to cheat through a first semester circuits course, and with a little basic programming make a command line prompt that any idiot could fill in to get the right answers. I don't know if most eng. students realize this at the time they take linear circuits, though.

I don’t think this would be cheating. Setting up the system of equations is the skill that’s being tested. Having to solve that system to get the answer is incidental, and it’s mostly a skill the student is already assumed to have.

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

#329

Post by IIAOPSW »

mcphage wrote: post #95
jmcphers wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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 You're thinking in the wrong direction—testing companies don't really care if you can access notes that you wrote, they don't want you to be able to quickly type up new notes as you take the test. Specifically, they don't want you to be able to copy down the test que…

I had an 84 in high school and didn't even hide that I was doing this and didn't consider it cheating. The way I see it, if you understand the material well enough to program a computer to do it then you have understood the material. Not allowing me to make and use my own automation tool is just artificial difficulty. Now the kids who only used the program function to hide notes, those kids were cheaters.

To this day I don't consider myself to have understood something until I can code it.

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

#330

Post by dgoldstein0 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #329
mcphage wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 You're thinking in the wrong direction—testing companies don't really care if you can access notes that you wrote, they don't want you to be able to quickly type up new notes as you take the test. Specifically, they don't want you to be able to copy down the test que…

I had an 84 in high school and didn't even hide that I was doing this and didn't consider it cheating. The way I see it, if you understand the material well enough to program a computer to do it then you have understood the material. Not allowing me to make and use my own automation tool is just artificial difficulty. Now the kids who only used the program function to hide notes, those kids were cheaters. To this day…

This is somewhat fair, but the programs are also shareable. So if you s shared your program, presumably others could have the advantage without having understood the material
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