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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?

#221

Post by TomJansen »

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

You can store notes on the TI-84! With the program called TI NoteFolio. This can be disabled in at least The Netherlands with the so-called "Examenstand"[0] (Exam mode).

[0] https://education.ti.com/nl/resources/examenstand-84

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

#222

Post by homero »

TomJansen wrote: post #221
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 You can store notes on the TI-84! With the program called TI NoteFolio. This can be disabled in at least The Netherlands with the so-called "Examenstand"[0] (Exam mode). [0] https://education.ti.com/nl/resources/examenstand-84

Yeah i used to store all kinds of notes and even functions

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

#223

Post by brokenmachine »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #211
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.

Some prison rules are written in blood. Most prison rules are written in bureaucracy and profit motive. No prison escape movie ever ended with the guard preventing future escapes by instituting a new "no sleeveless shirts when visiting an inmate" rule.

Forgive my ignorance, but how do sleeveless shirts help facilitate an escape?

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

#224

Post by the_narrator »

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).

This was common and well known even in the mid 90's with the TI-82. So much so that when my high school calculus class mostly bombed a test, the instructor asked us how we could have possibly failed his test when we were all using "notes" on our calculator.

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

#225

Post by morpheuskafka »

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…

On the SAT you can use programs and notes (obviously you are not supposed to share test content, but there is no specific prohibited on the notes feature. I think the ACT says you are not supposed to somewhere in the instructions but they do not clear the calculators. Only time I've had them clear the calculators was for some state-mandated EOGs that you could do with your eyes closed.

And it can't be that hard to build a modified logic board that includes an LTE modem or WiFi chip and fits inside the case of a TI-84. If you're just going to copy the answers you wouldn't even need to bother cloning all the math features, just the very basics. The test proctors barely glance at the calculators as they hand out the test books, no one would notice minor changes in the look of the screen or case.

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

#226

Post by acjohnson55 »

imglorp wrote: post #89
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…

Plus you probably learn more coding the algorithm into a calculator than you would learn regurgitating something from memory. That's a win either way.

That was how I justified it to myself when I did this and ran a fake memory cleared / program hiding program on my 83. Sorry not sorry.

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

#227

Post by afiori »

monocasa wrote: post #86
bsznjyewgd wrote: post #66

I feel really out of the loop here. I went through a pretty standard curriculum in the 2000s and have never owned or used a graphing calculator (aside from the few times the teacher demonstrated our school's TI-83s in class in high school). What are they used for? [And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and o…

> I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with That's the key. There's two schools of thought that have their pros and cons. 1) using magic number means no calculator, but students can get by searching for clean answers and might not truly understand the topic. 2) using real world examples grounds the curriculum in reality so ther…

I have a strong bias towards the first school, the point being that opaque calculation are simply harder to reason about.

I also agree that handling complex computations is a relevant skill, but then what you need to learn is the mental book keeping of where you are and what you need to do that you need to learn.

The only case where calculators are truly useful is in sciences, where numbers are just a tool to scientific insight.

(moreover in math if you need trigonometric tables chances are that you are going to learn better math by keeping symbolic answers)

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

#228

Post by hamandcheese »

mattbreeden wrote: post #139
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…

You can do this just as easily as it was to make your original notes

Which is not particularly easy. No way could anyone both pass a test and copy the questions into a ti84.

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

#229

Post by dillonmckay »

macintux wrote: post #159
lb1lf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in our high school equivalent, our maths teacher blew that trick out of the water simply by having us all clear the calculator memory, then having us swap calculators at random. Worked a charm. Next time, noone had bothered to hide notes as they didn't want to spend time helping some random sod out. Solidarity is dead. (You could, of course, try to counter this by having the entire class install the same c…

I’d be in trouble: I use RPN calculators, and am practically crippled if I try to use anything else. Of course, I’d probably not be in as much trouble as whatever poor sod got stuck with my HP.

48?

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

#230

Post by morpheuskafka »

make3 wrote: post #176
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.

I mean you could store some dumbly ciphered information on a sheet too, but I guess it's not as convenient

A microcontroller with a decent CPU (a Zilog Z80 in this case) could, given enough time, run some serious AES-256 encryption. The storage is minimal but it could be good enough.

Of course, you could always use a paper one-time pad, and if you can get the pad distributed without interception, there's no way they can ever break that.

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