Texas Instruments Announces New Calculator

S. Kinney writes "TI recently announced the development of a new calculator, known as the Voyage 200, to replace the TI-92+. The software changes are rather minor, as the device is designed to be compatible with the 92, though the addition of a clock makes the Voyage more functional for some, and the case of the device enjoys a new design. Perhaps the most useful upgrade to the 92+ is the addition of more memory, for a sum of 2.7 MB of storage. No word on release date, but it'll be interesting to see how this comes out. It may be one more step towards releasing a modern-day Avigo, their failed PDA from a few years back. "

Comments

Does it do RPN?

[edremy]

Without RPN, it's just a toy. Worse, it's a toy given to college students who never learn how to do anything more complex than 2+3. A complicated chemistry problem involving 3 whole steps is way beyond them. Sadly, I speak from experience...

I mourn for the HP calculator division. My 11C still works great after 20 years- I keep it in my flight bag for weight and balance calcs. My 28S died last year after 14 hard years of use through college, grad school, postdoc and 2 jobs. I suspect I'll still be using my 49G years after the last of these are sitting in landfills.

Eric

resolution

[llamalicious]

must have, more pixels.

zooming and zooming and zooming to cheat when finding the intersections of lines on paraboli is much too time consuming.

double or triple the resolution, maybe you'll only have to zoom once.

I can't hold back my tears of joy!

[Guppy06]

I'm sorry, I don't care what the rest of you say about HP and reverse Polish notation, the TI-92+ is a thing of shear beauty, and I for one am glad that they're making a sequel. My TI-92+ was worth the money alone in both the cost of a book of integration tables as well as the time and effort of flipping through it.

Symbollic integration is a beautiful thing and it came in damned handy in my Partial Differential Equations class. Thank you, TI, for making LaPlace transforms easier to handle.

And before you all jump on my back, I'm not saying I can't do the integrals myself (I did them just fine on all the tests, thank you very much), but it kept the homework from consuming months of my life.

So bad-mouth TI's stuff all you want, I'm still probably going to get this bad boy as soon as it comes out (still have quantum mechanics classes ahead of me).

What do people typically use these for?

[mttlg]

Ok, I admit that I'm a bit out of touch with advances in calculator technology. What I'm curious about is what advantages these new gizmos have over earlier graphing calculators - what do people actually do with them? In high school, graphing calculators were mandatory for calculus, so of course we did all kinds of neat things just because we had the calculators, but in college I really only used my TI-85 for repetitive calculations. Now that I deal with words more than numbers, I don't use it at all. This new calculator seems to be marketed for educational use, so what wonderful things are younger kids doing with these things in school (other than playing games and cheating on exams)? And yes, this is a serious question. I honestly want to know what role these newer calculators play in education (not enough to hunt down the answers myself of course, just out of curiosity).

Re:What do people typically use these for?

[Wire Tap]

This new calculator seems to be marketed for educational use, so what wonderful things are younger kids doing with these things in school

Unfortunately, this is one of the things that hurt a student's math career. I really don't see the place for calculators in high school math classes. Physics? Chemistry? Sure, but not math. High school math classes should be aimed at teaching the material, and making sure the students have a very intimate knowledge of how and why things work out as they do. If the students use calculators, vital intermediary steps are removed from the process, and most of the students will miss quite a bit from those steps.

That being said, yes, I used my 89 in high school. Not for repetative calculations, not for cheating, but I used it to teach myself. If I couldn't possibly understand why a certian derivative came out to be what my answer was on homework some night, I would punch it in, set the variable to an arbitrary number, and check the output value. It helped me verify that what I was doing was correct. After one or two verifications, I would not use the calculator again during that lesson.

However, I regret that I used it at all. I don't have a particularly good sense about numbers. I am fairly well apt at most mathematics, but admit that I can't do basic division in my head. I had my Chemistry teacher teach me how to do long division last year - MY SENIOR YEAR. He was amazed that I couldn't do it, as I was 4th in my class, and never complained about a math exam. It's all because I used my calculator earlier in life, and I lost my number sense.

So, the moral of the story is: do not use the calculator when you are still learning the very basics. It will rob you of something that you can never get back: the prima facia experience of the methods and solutions. After the material is learned, sure, use the calculator to simplify your life in your job, etc... I sure plan on it!

Re:What do people typically use these for?

[dillon_rinker]

As you indicate, arithmetical calculators can be damaging if misused. I have seen students use calculators to multiply by zero and by one. I have seen students retry these operations several times, thinking they pushed the wrong buttons when the result is either their original number or zero. The end product, of course, is stupid people.

HOWEVER, the topic at hand is GRAPHING calculators. These, when used properly, are a joy to behold. Graphing 20 equations of the form y=mx+b is a good night's homework assignment, and you expect no intuition to develop from it except among the sharp students. However, with a graphing calculator to display the lines and mark the axes, you can have students graph 20 lines during class, and they can realize for themselves what m and b mean - the former describes the steepness of the line, the latter the 'height' of the line above the origin. You can do teach this concept without preceding it with the usual weeks of training in formal algebraic concepts. You can spend a single day on the slope-intercept form of linear equations and expect that students will retain more for longer than they would if you spent a week on it without graphing calculators.

Think of any form of graphing that you've ever done...without a calculator, it is a laborious and inaccurate task of plotting points and connecting the dots badly. With a graphing calculator, it is a matter of entering MANY equations and developing understanding of how varying parameters varies the graph, and creating a deep understanding of the relationship between the graph and the equation. Compare that with merely knowing that an equation with a squared term will probably be a parabola.

I could go on and on, but I'll simply restate my point: graphing calculators are powerful tools for developing intuitions about the relationship between equations and graphs. Without them, you simply can't do this. With them, you can still teach how to graph on graph paper, but having done so, you can move on to skipping the pointless (pun) manual labor and studying the equations and graphs themselves.

I had my Chemistry teacher teach me how to do long division last year - MY SENIOR YEAR. He was amazed that I couldn't do itBegin rant...Long division is an algorithm, one of many that can be used to divide multi-digit numbers. It's a poor teacher who expresses surprise at a students' ignorance. Ignorance of an algorithm does not equate to poor "number sense", as I use the phrase, but that's a topic for another day. Anyway, it's a poor teacher who expresses surprise at a student's ignorance. They are either making themselves feel superior, or they are so inexperienced with human nature that they have no understanding of the concept of forgetfulness. The fact that someone was supposed to stand up in front of you and explain an algorithm to you eight years ago has ZERO correlation with whether or not you remember that algorithm now. End rant...

Re:What do people typically use these for?

[mttlg]

Unfortunately, this is one of the things that hurt a student's math career. I really don't see the place for calculators in high school math classes. Physics? Chemistry? Sure, but not math. High school math classes should be aimed at teaching the material, and making sure the students have a very intimate knowledge of how and why things work out as they do. If the students use calculators, vital intermediary steps are removed from the process, and most of the students will miss quite a bit from those steps.

The problem here isn't that calculators are used, it's how they are used. If the curriculum isn't designed to account for the strengths and weaknesses of the type of calculators being used (basic, scientific, and graphing, and yes, it does matter which type is selected for a course and all students must use the same type), then what you describe will take place. This has been the common result as calculators have been used more widely in schools in recent years, simply because there is a severe shortage of real teachers out there. Calculators have been used as a crutch to help poor students deal with poor teachers, allowing the educational system to claim improvement while the situation worsens. Beyond the quality of education issue, many teachers simply don't know how to properly integrate calculators into their curriculum, but find that they must due to the widespread social acceptance. I was shocked when the SAT II Math 1c and 2c tests came out, having taken the regular Math 1 test the year before and finding it to be reasonable (and not requiring a calculator at all). I took the Math 2c test the first year it was offered, ending up below the 90th percentile with a perfect score. That's right, over 10% of the people who took it got everything right. The exam was obviously not properly designed for calculators.

However, this does not mean that calculators can't be used properly in a high school setting. A course at that level that makes use of calculators but does not teach the use of the calculators is doing it wrong. A course that was taught successfully without calculators and adopts the use of calculators without a change in curriculum is doing it wrong. Calculator use must be limited to fundamentals that have already been learned - nothing beyond the basics should be needed before calculus for general use. The strengths and weaknesses of the calculator must also be taught - quick computation vs. time and effort spent on entering in numbers instead of solving the problem. Calculators allow people to make mistakes faster, so checking the results to make sure they make sense (which requires understanding the operations) must be emphasized. And of course, an occasional "no calculators" quiz or exam is good, as are equations that simplify quickly without a calculator but take forever with one. You can't just drop calculators into education and pretend they aren't there.

However, I regret that I used it at all. I don't have a particularly good sense about numbers. I am fairly well apt at most mathematics, but admit that I can't do basic division in my head. I had my Chemistry teacher teach me how to do long division last year - MY SENIOR YEAR. He was amazed that I couldn't do it, as I was 4th in my class, and never complained about a math exam. It's all because I used my calculator earlier in life, and I lost my number sense.

You seem very quick to blame the calculator. I would seriously question this unless you were a math whiz before using calculators - did you even learn long division before being corrupted by the evil calculator? Quite simply, not everyone understands math as well as everyone else. Some people can think in terms of even the most abstract concepts, some just can't work with basic numbers, some fall into both categories at the same time. Sometimes people just take a while to latch onto certain concepts - I'm still figuring out better ways of visualizing things and performing basic operations that I had trouble with in school. If your education was really impaired due to the use of calculators, I would place the blame on the school system and your parents for not teaching you properly (and yes, parents need to be involved in education, and I'm not just saying this because my father was a math teacher).

So, the moral of the story is: do not use the calculator when you are still learning the very basics. It will rob you of something that you can never get back: the prima facia experience of the methods and solutions.

One of my first toys was an ordinary pocket calculator. Later on, I got my first scientific calculator before I knew what most of the functions did. When I got a graphing calculator, I learned a lot about programming and algorithms that I never understood before (never having used a computer for programming despite growing up with at least one in the house at all times), while playing games during classes or just being creative (I had so much fun with my Space Invaders "game" that was just two alternating pictures - it took some people quite a while to realize that it was a trick). Having these tools never robbed me of anything. If anything, calculators allowed me to explore things before understanding them, helping me along and giving me insight that I may not have had the patience to discover otherwise (like the relationship between 9 and repeating decimals). I used calculators to supplement education and not replace it. Maybe I'm just an anomaly, but this is proof that calculators don't have to be harmful.

Opinions of a TI geek

[MBCook]

I've followed TI cals for years. I've programed them, used them, and own most all of the models. My current favorites are the 83 (for simplicity), and the 89 (for power). Here are my thoughts on this new calculator:

First of all I have to say that I'm glad they redesigned the 92(+). It's always been a great calculator but the thing is big as hell. It's thick, heavy, HUGE (which is why I like the 89). I'm sure that this one won't weight nearyly so much, which is a MAJOR plus.

It's good to hear that it's compatible with software made for the 92+. This means that tons and tons of games are all ready ready to go. If they don't work, chances are that they won't need much tweaking before they do.

Having more storage is also great. I've always fought with my calculators trying to put on all the games that I like without running out of memory. The flash on the 83+ and 89 is nice, but you can't run assembly programs out of it. You have to move them from flash to normal ram to play them, which is anoying. This is the one thing that I hope they change.

Over all looks good. I'm sorry I didn't write more, but I've got lots of surfing to do. I can't wait to get my hands on one in a store of find someone who buys one so I can check it out first hand.