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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?

#431

Post by jacobolus »

mkl wrote: post #393
jacobolus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There is no reason for any math course at any level to ever need a calculator, period. Numerical methods courses need calculators for questions about practice rather than theory. Basic (non-graphing) cheap ones are usually sufficient, though. I think slide rules are thoroughly obsolete in almost every context. There's no point in wasting students' time when better tools are available.

None of the professional numerical analysts I know work with a handheld calculator.

The point of learning a slide rule is not that it is a particularly important practical tool, but that understanding how it works has independent pedagogical value.

If someone built their own electronic calculator from discrete components, programmed one on an FPGA, or even implemented a bunch of mathematical functions on an existing computer, that would be similarly educational (though teaching different things than the slide rule), but just knowing how to navigate the interface of an electronic calculator doesn’t teach anything.

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

#432

Post by filleduchaos »

jacobolus wrote: post #425
filleduchaos wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is quite the gulf between learning how to program and having to look up cosines and so on in mathematical tables (which I once had to do when my calculator stopped working five minutes to the start of an exam), a gulf which handheld calculators occupy very comfortably. > Learning to fluently navigate a handheld calculator is not an important life skill It very arguably is. Contrary to what HNers seem to think,…

Nobody needs a $100 Texas Instruments graphing calculator to tally up receipts or compute the cosine of 28° (the latter is something a carpenter might need to do, but should not be showing up extensively in high school math classes). If people want to buy $5 “scientific calculator”, a 4-function calculator with a paper tape, use a free calculator app on their phone, type their arithmetic into google, ...., that’s jus…

Amazingly, I have said nothing about having to buy $100 graphing calculators.

You on the other hand called _all_ handheld calculators a waste of time.

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

#433

Post by jacobolus »

filleduchaos wrote: post #432
jacobolus wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs a $100 Texas Instruments graphing calculator to tally up receipts or compute the cosine of 28° (the latter is something a carpenter might need to do, but should not be showing up extensively in high school math classes). If people want to buy $5 “scientific calculator”, a 4-function calculator with a paper tape, use a free calculator app on their phone, type their arithmetic into google, ...., that’s jus…

Amazingly, I have said nothing about having to buy $100 graphing calculators. You on the other hand called _all_ handheld calculators a waste of time.

Using a handheld 4-function or scientific calculator can save time. There is nothing wrong with the existence of calculators. The problematic part is their pervasiveness in school.

Spending nontrivial amounts of classroom time on practicing using a handheld calculator is a waste. Assigning high school students long lists of exercises where they punch numbers into calculators and then write down the answers is a waste of time and attention.

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

#434

Post by anchpop »

frostburg wrote: post #6
borgel wrote: post #2

Approximately related, I find the NumWorks calculator [1] absolutely enthralling. It has a fairly beefy modern ARM Cortex M4 processor which runs an attractive GUI written in Python. And yes, you can write and run Python on the device. The hardware is very well described [2] in human terms and electrical schematics are available. Software is totally open source and the device can be easily reflashed. I'm not sure wha…

It's nice but as far as I know it doesn't have a real CAS despite its processing power.

What does this prevent it from doing? Would it be useful at a Calc 1-2 level?

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

#435

Post by asdff »

gonehome wrote: post #174
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…

I find the 89 to be a huge leap over the 83 entirely because of the screen UX. On the 89 it would draw the actual fractions and show exponents in superscript rather than only using parenthesis. You could also scroll up to previous entries and bring them back to the editor (or get previous answers). The mistakes you avoid from not having to count parenthesis and being able to easily access previously typed equations w…

The 84 did that too

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

#437

Post by gmiller123456 »

therealrootuser wrote: post #71
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".

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…

nyway, in my opinion, a good mathematics course should focus less on regurgitation of formulas, and more on problems solving

Really depends on the goal of the course. I agree a lot of courses I took focused too much on memorizing equations, but if you haven't committed something to memory, odds are you won't recognize new problems it can be used to solve. So, yea, 99% of everything you memorize will be worthless, but the problem is predicting which 1% will be useful in the future.

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

#438

Post by rolltiide »

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…

12 years ago I put a TI-84 emulator on my Nintendo DS and used that instead.

It was novel at the time and professors enjoyed it but it was short-lived as they soon mandated that calculators cant have an internet connection so that students couldn't cheat on tests.

I’m sure if I was in college now I would learn or create other tricks.

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

#439

Post by turk73 »

As the parent of a 9th grader taking Alegbra 2, I can tell you that I was a little surprised that I had to buy a TI graphing calculator nearly identical to the TI-81 (?) I had in the late '80s/early '90s. My old blue one died at some point long ago, but it got me through a lot of courses. I later fell in love with an HP 48X during college which I still have and recently demonstrated how it works to my daughter. We still bought her the TI for school because it makes sense the way every soldier having the same rifle makes sense.

TI had smart marketing and sales teams. The article is a hit piece that isn't well deserved because while yes, they did corner their market, they also did a ton of outreach to schools and teachers and that is badly needed when school districts struggle so hard to deal with technology on tight budgets. The retro tech doesn't bother me at all, it is actually welcome. Math hasn't changed. If the approach works, keep using it! I'm not so sure about the lobbying aspect of it, but all corporations lobby on their own behalf. It's a tried and true method of maximizing profits.

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

#440

Post by tanr54ok »

Izkata wrote: post #423
tanr54ok wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol In the 90s the venerable ti82, 83, 85 just had battery backed ram. No long term memory. Get off my lawn.

Note that they didn't say a version number. The TI-83 Plus most definitely did have long-term ("archive") memory. I even still have mine in working order.

I am aware of that. The “get off my lawn” is a reference to the fact that those of us who are older would not have had access to such modern conveniences as flash memory in high school, and that the poster is too young to be aware of TI calculators that didn’t have this feature.

Anyway I used an HP48GX throughout high school (carrying a TI83 only if absolutely necessary). The HP had a pretty much universal following in France.

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