Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thehustle.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 460 posts

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

#371

Post by ppmanik »

avhon1 wrote: post #319
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?

It is much easier to write math tests if you can assume that the students can do arithmetic, matrix inversion and multiplication, trigonometry, logarithms, regressions, variance, etc, nearly instantly.

Why does a math test need to have numeric stuff? Can't they design exams which do not need numerical calculations and only require solving equations?

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

#373

Post by JohnBooty »

LukeShu wrote: post #202
JohnBooty wrote: post #46

It'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…

> I'm picturing a high school math teacher trying to support 20-30 kids running 20-30 different BYOD'd devices I don't get this fear of BYOD. It should be fine to say "these are the devices I'll support, if you'd rather use something else, that's fine, but I won't be able to help you." (In testing situations, I do understand the fear of BYOD for devices that might provide too many capabilities.) When I was in high sc…

    Here is is a list of the devices that I am familiar 
    with, and can support. I advise that you use one of 
    these devices, so that if you have trouble with it, 
    I can help you. You are free to use a different 
    device if you like, but if you have trouble with it, 
    finding the solution is your own responsibility.
This is utterly reasonable, but here's the problem: a lot of kids have utterly unreasonable circumstances.

Please think of the least-advantaged kids when we think of things like this.

A lot of kids don't even have parents that are willing or able to help with their education at all.

There are a lot of parents who can hardly feed their kids.

Let's recognize our privilege here. There are a lot of parents who don't have an ability to buy something from a list of approved devices. They can't order things online, because they don't have credit cards or they can't safely have packages left on their doorsteps. They may be long bus rides away from someplace they can buy one of these blessed devices.

And yeah, a lot of parents will jump through whatever hoops necessary to get their kids the $100 or $50 thing they need for math class.

What's the plan for those who don't?

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

#374

Post by cgriswald »

pkaye wrote: post #39
jedberg wrote: post #21

Earlier 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".

Yes most of my engineering classes back in college allowed you to use a cheat-sheet. Cheat sheets are way faster than thumbing through a book or notes in a calculator. And most problems required you to show your work. Maybe you could cross-check your results and fix something. The funny thing is to an extent, the performance of the student seems to be inversely proportional to the density of the cheat-sheet. The wors…

That’s funny. My cheat sheets have always been very dense, heavily detailed, organized, and usually color coded affairs, and I’ve always performed highly. The process of creating the sheet helped me organize the topic in my mind and being thorough helped me root out any weak spots in my knowledge. It was also very rare I ever used the cheat sheet during the exam. I just didn’t need to after making it.

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

#375

Post by sdenton4 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #249
therealrootuser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Back in Algebra 1 my teacher had a policy that you were allowed to use any program that you wrote yourself. More teachers should do that, though it'd get challenging to enforce if it weren't just the one or two nerdy kids taking you up on it.

One of my grad school math classes in differential geometry had a week-long take-home test. I requested to turn in a set of python scripts (i think this was juuuust before notebooks became A Thing), which the prof was happy to accept. The test problems effectively became test cases. I learned a ton.

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

#376

Post by mrlambchop »

bsamuels wrote: post #27
jedberg wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Guilty as charged. A program that did a was enough (with a bit of execution timing) to show the examiner on the way into the hall that all was good.

The attention to detail really got to me however over time - the normal reset message was in lower case, but all the custom programs could print was in UPPER case. I was always "its sooo obvious - they'll find me out", when I saw RESET, but nobody ever clocked.

I never did use these notes or solvers in an exam - once I knew I had them, I would remember them anyway.

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

#377

Post by krick »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #4

TI 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.

Schools are the real problem here. After all, you don't get triggered by the fact, that there are very specific books every student has to buy for the course, do you? I think you should.

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

#378

Post by yitchelle »

bsder wrote: post #165
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

And absolutely killed the absolute best engineering calculator to ever exist--the HP48SX. I still use all my HP calculators from the 80's and early 90's. It's all about the keyboard. I can enter enormous streams of numbers and operators and never miss .

I worked for the HP calculator back in the early 90s. It was the first generation HP calculator that is looking to using new keyboard technology. The amount engineering effort to keep the tactile feedback was significant. It had to be just the right amount of click as well as the amount of pressure needed to make the contact.

The tactile feedback on the HP calculators is one of the those things that defined that product.

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

#379

Post by ericst »

kyancey wrote: post #370
nwallin wrote: post #333

Bedridges law of headlines: If the answer to a question posed in the headline of a news article is either "yes" or "no", the answer is "no". (paraphrased) I think the problem here is that this is ultimately left up to individual teachers, and 15% of them will take the easy way out and say "you can only use the ti-84. Not the Casio equivalent, not the HP equivalent, the ti-84”. Word goes around to not bother with the…

As a teacher, just having some kids using a TI-84 and some using a TI-89 is a headache. If I don't have a consistent set, I constantly have to stop and give two sets of instructions to account for minor UI differences. There's no way I could deal with everyone having different ones.

In school when we got introduced to calculator, the teacher told us that he was not here to teach it to us. Only maybe guide us, we had a few lessons of us sitting down with the manual and having to learn (mostly by ourselves, but he would also help) how to use the calculator we chose. After that, it was to each its own, he wouldn't give any explanations...

This is IMHO fair, he was anyway teaching us math, not using a calculator.

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

#380

Post by computator »

japhyr wrote: post #58

I've been a math and science teacher for the last 25 years. I have always told students they could use whatever device worked for them, and I have alway been very clear that the only reason TI calculators are so prevalent is because the test-taking companies require them. The only time I have encouraged their use is for students who are going to take a test that requires them, and even then they should only use them…

I never heard of Desmos until now; it looks like an outstanding educational tool with pages and pages of exercises, demos, and aids for teaching math.

But I can't fathom how they make money. Their "about" page lists 29 high-qualification employees, and they're located in a high-cost city (San Francisco). If the loaded cost of each employee is $150K, they'd have to make $4.3 million a year just to pay salaries and overhead.

I can't find a single item on their website that has a price listed: everything is free! They don't even have ads. They talk about partnerships and such, but I can't figure out how they charge money and what they charge for.

Public schools are stingy when it comes to learning aids; teaching math is not in the same category like spending for a football stadium. There are 56 million elementary, middle, and high schools in the U.S.[1]. If they charged $1 per student in some partnership deal, they have to sign up at least 7% of the entire U.S. student body just to meet payroll and overhead. Don't get me wrong, their software looks absolutely wonderful, but I don't understand the business case.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enroll...

Post reply on HN