Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by Wowfunhappy » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 10:44 AM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #344

dTal wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it worked for you - but surely in an adversarial context, there's absolutely no way to trust a previously untrusted device. In the extreme case, the entire interface might simply be a simulacrum app designed to feign success at locking.

I don't know how that would work since the teacher could reboot the device or hit/swipe home to exit the fake app. If the fake app was in guided access mode, they'd see a pin input instead of a home screen. The only way to fool the teacher would be to jailbreak the device. The 6s running iOS 9 is the most recent untethered jailbreak. All newer devices and iOS versions will revert back to stock kernel after reboot. Th…

Why does the Jailbreak need to be untethered? Is the teacher walking around and making every student reboot in front of them? Rebooting takes a solid minute, so in a not-particularly-large class of 20 kids, you’re dedicating a solid 20 minutes to this activity.

Once Jailbroken, I don’t think you’d need a fake app. Just make a very simple patch that overrides whatever is preventing you from returning to the homescreen, and set up the patch to be enabled by a secret Activator action, like pressing the volume buttons in a secret sequence.

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

#402

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 11:32 AM UTC

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…

Clear your memory? No way. There’s hundreds of hours of work in those programs.

Anyway, I think my school figured that if you were smart enough to write those programs you would be smart enough to figure out the solution.

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

#403

Post by baud147258 » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #250

cydonian_monk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sciences courses, I remember one exam (at least) where calculators were forbidden and instead the exam sheet included a bunch of calculations that might or might not be needed. Of course it helped since if you land on a calculation that's on the sheet, you're likely on the right direction.

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

#404

Post by VLM » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #290

clamprecht wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-programmable calculators were fine - computers were not. A programmable calculator is basically a computer. In a computer you could store data that they couldn't access (encryption, even if it's very basic). Could be a list of gambling debts, escape plans, or other horrors. Most prison rules are "written in blood", so to speak.

Too bad you can do encryption using pen and paper (even RSA).

Its easy for a guard to find pages of paper with uuencoded RSA keys handwritten on them during a random search, and then the investigation really gets started. However its hard to train every guard on every piece of digital technology that can theoretically contain data.

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

#405

Post by joezydeco » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 11:49 AM UTC

Invictus0 wrote: post #289

joezydeco wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is. I bought my son's TI-84 on eBay for 1/3 of the retail price. There are plenty in desk drawers of graduated kids, but they're also pretty beat up. In particular, the display seems to be built very cheaply and prone to damage.

That hasn't been my experience. I've had my TI-84 for 9 years and that thing took quite a beating. Still works perfectly today: can't say that for all the phones I've had in that time.

While trying to select one out of the multitudes on eBay, a significant number had this "smudge" on the LCD. And they all look similar:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fyQAAOSwzahdiVGQ/s-l1600.jpg

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

#406

Post by VLM » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 11:59 AM UTC

The article author doesn't seem to have kids. I do. The elementary kids leverage Alexa for arithmetic and spelling. This is why their spelling is awful and they complain about the math teacher forcing them to "show their work". Alexa ruins spelling education but not arithmetic, as long as the teacher isn't lazy about requiring explanations and multiple lines of proof of doing it by hand. The teens use wolfram alpha to learn how to do algebra, and graph, so given the answer, they use their crappy calculator which hasn't changed since I was in HS to get the same result as wolfram provided, so they can pass tests.

Another oddity that indicates the journalist has no kids, is making it an amazing invention in 2011 that a Yale guy is the first human to ever notice income inequality, which is comedic to read. Both in the 90s and today, classrooms always have a basket of calculators for either forgetful or poor kids to use. Also the school library. Of course a borrowed calc will not have special notes hidden in them...

Much like cursive, nobody uses calculators after school. Even the last few genx I know have given up on balancing checkbooks using calculators. Actually the only people I know who still balance checkbooks the old fashioned way are boomer and older and they're literally dying out. With everything paid online, I only have maybe one or two checks per month to "balance" and that doesn't require a protocol and algorithm to "balance".

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

#407

Post by ChicagoBoy11 » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

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…

Bring good memories of trying to get around that during HS. At first people would store notes and things in programs, so teachers wisened up that you had to clear your memory. But there was a way you could archive programs, so then they figured out how to make sure you hadn't done that, either.

But they never foiled the genius plan a friend of mine and I concocted to write a program that would simulate all of the screens involved in the "check" that teachers did to make sure you had cleared your memory correctly. What we were most proud of was the fact that after it was all 'done', you could even enter basic calculations in the calculator and it would behave as expected, making you none the wiser that you were actually running a program of ours all along.

We also never used it for cheating. There was just something beautiful about knowing that we could, plus we had so many other games and things that it was always a pain to have to reinstall things after an assessment. Ohh the memories!

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

#408

Post by ChicagoBoy11 » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

lozaning wrote: post #31

eurleif wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no ability to store notes What? It can run custom programs. Of course it can store notes.

Hell I had a buddy in high school that went through and wrote a custom program that's only function was to perfectly 'emulate' the entire calculators menu system, so that when asked to demonstrate that he had no notes or programs, he could go through the entire process of showing nothing being archived and then wiping the memory. Dude wound up in the Stanford CS program after high school, so clearly he learned someth…

Ha! I literally just wrote a reply saying that exact same thing. Crazy to realize how so many kids did this... there should be a club or something. I wonder how good a predictor of doing this in school is of certain lifetime outcome variables...

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

#409

Post by clamprecht » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

lenova wrote: post #381

clamprecht wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say "NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR" as its startup message, so they wouldn't take it during a random search. I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.

I fascinated by the hinted-at backstory here. Would you mind sharing how you came to program in prison? Was it before, or during your time that you learned?

I learned before I went to prison.

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

#410

Post by rwmurrayVT » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

clamprecht wrote: post #108

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).

In prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say "NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR" as its startup message, so they wouldn't take it during a random search. I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.

We had one also in a low security facility. Random things always end up floating in when people transfer from camps to lows. For some reason at the camp we weren't allowed to have beard trimmers or fans. We didn't have AC so people would run out and smuggle in fans.. $250 just to have some minor comfort in the 95F heat :(