Slashdot Mirror
Calculators vs. PDAs in the Classroom
TheMatt writes "CNN.com is reporting about a new conflict perhaps emerging in classrooms: calculators v. PDAs. The article talks about how TI seems to be making their latest calculator more PDA-like, while PDAs are gaining
TI-like functionality. A comment on current math education is this quote from the article:
"When you have circles and ellipses, there is no way you'd be able to do this without a calculator," Jarvis said. "It helps us visualize what we're doing." Were the compass and geometry uninvented?"
do other conflicts in the classroom include PDA functions that may help a student on an exam that aren't included in a calculator? I could see profs being concerned about students using thier PDA to cheat.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
The downside of being a geek is you don't know whether to lose face admitting your system is down and you can't reach it -or- admit you really didn't do your homework, thus can't download it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I always remember playing SimCity on my friends TI-86 during math class, does this mean I can play it on a PDA too?! Anyone else play SimCity on a TI? It was pretty damned good for a calc game.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The compass and protractor are as obsolete as the sextant. If a kid graduates from school and doesn't know how to work a PDA, he's going to quickly learn how to work a deep fryer.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What? not 6 years ago I/we were required to graph the fuckers manually, and we actually explicitly forbidden from using snazzy ti calcs to do it.
Paper and pen help you visualize what you are doing, a calculator which draws everything for you, just makes you think you did it. No-one needs these to learn mathematics, atleast not before doing their master's thesis in a university.
Sorry, but even after all these years its hard to beat the HP-48. After 8 years I still use mine everyday.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Taking a computer-assisted calculus course in college was one of the worst academic mistakes I ever made. Sure I learned some Mathematica, but it set me back a few semesters in my Calc knowledge. I was able to lean so heavily on the software to do calculations that I forgot stuff I had known previously! In the followup multivariate class I kept reaching to the right side of my notebook to hit SHIFT-RETURN.
There are already problems with students putting formulae into calculators. I would only think this would get worse with a PDA. With a calculator you can ask and see that the memory has been reset without much worry about lost data. A PDA stores other things though and so it would be alot harder to check that it has been cleared or that the student isn't using it to cheat.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Real men use HP.
My 48SX is 10 years old and still kicks ass.
...make a version of Mathematica for the PDA, and the concern: "I'm waiting for moms to say, 'Wait, I already bought a Palm. Why do I have to buy a calculator too?"' will fly out the window.
Then it's up to the SAT folks to evolve.
I do A LOT of calculations in Mathemagica, many of which don't require the full use of my computer. A PDA version would be pretty neat-o.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
As one young math professior I had in college said I hope you sometime get the fun of working in at least 11 dimintions. He was a young guy (first you teaching), and was truely serious about that. Now I can deal with 2d graphics just fine, and 3d graphs are normally not a problem, though optical illusions sometimes are possible so I don't rely on them, but the one 4d graph I saw just threw my mind in a loop, and I decided not to bother with them again.
Maybe I'm not a visual person, but I can't deal with 4d graphs. I can deal with math in 11 dimentions if I have to, though I'm not good. The ability to work on 2d and 3d problems without a graph helps when you deal with problems that cannot be easially graphed.
Then again, all my college classes allowed calculators, but the time to enter numbers was longer than the time to calculate things in my head so I rarely used my HP-48 after my freshman year.
I didn't touch a calculator my first two years of college calculus. Everything was variables except for some simple math. These kids will only be set back in college if they start to rely on their calculators. Then again, maybe college profs are making it easier and allowing calculators. NOT!!
Surely in either case, calculator or PDA, they are simply tools. As long as the fundamentals are still being taught, isn't that all that matters ?
We use tools to make our lives easier - and there's no harm in that, as long as we understand the principles behind them.
I have no problem with "aids" such as graphing calculators and PDAs in the classroom as long as the "ole fashioned" ways (i.e. by hand on paper) are taught/learned first. We've become a society (in the US at least) where most people have to carry around tip charts in order to function in restaurants.
Just the other day I saw someone use a butane lighter to light a cigarette. Apparently they don't even know the basic ways to make fire anymore. Was the tinder box uninvented?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It's not as if PDA's would raise the distraction level for calc classes already using TI's. How many people out there had games on their machines back in the day?
first year teaching. sorry about that.
Most PDAs depend on the touch screen, whereas calcs have buttons to achieve the specific task. I'd rather be pushing buttons then using a stylus to navigate the screen. Plus, you have to use HP with RPN! ;)
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
Wow,I really wish that the ti-83 had had this much storage when I was in high school going through the calculator phase. Way too many times did I have to delete a very cool game or OS in order to still be able to do anything with it.
And another thing, you could practically program cheats for every class of every year of your schooling in there! That just makes it too easy.
Why when I were a lad, we werent allowed to use calculators. (Only the rich kids had them anyway.) We had to do all of our plotting with protractors and compasses. It was tedius and we'd forget what we were doing while we were doing it because there were so many steps. Most understanding was lost while going through the motions, making mistakes and erasing holes into the paper. When we got to things like polar coordinate translation, or calculus, the steps become so complex that most of the students didnt have a clue about the big picture as they became mindless rote automatons emulating a tape head.
Kids these days get these glorious plotting computers that bypass the tedium and take you straight to the insight. They even have algorithms that do their algebra for them. And I am sure they have a much better high level understanding of what they're doing than I did even in college.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if their ability to actually solve by hand some of this stuff is as good as ours simply because they understand it better than we did.
No, but the compass and geometry are not patentable, and therfore there is no push from companies to sell them to schools, margins being what they are.
I wonder what this has to say about educating the consumer and educating the student.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Remembering formulas is pointless. Being able to apply the formulas is the goal.
Like, why not just go straight cellular and connect to the internet or your home beowulf cluster?
Why stop there? Put a webMathematica server up, and access it though your PDA.
...what would happen if there was some global disaster that took out electricity, and batteries were scarce.
I guess I've been watching too many Jeremiah episodes.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
As someone who tutors college math, I feel that more emphasis should be placed on working problems out by hand. When people become too dependent on calculators, they neglect basic math skills, and they lose insights as to how to solve problems. What's worse, when calculators give an unreasonable answer, many people aren't even aware of it because they don't know how to work the problem in the first place or can't estimate the range of the answer in their head. If these errors make their way into the real world of bridges, airplanes, stocks, etc., we're all going to be in trouble.
When the U.S. is graduating kids who don't even know how to read, cheating with a calculator should be the lowest item on the priority list.
I used a calc in class, we were required to for AP calculus, but we were also required to memorize everything.
I looked at him and said 'You're the math major, cant you do simple division?'
He replied 'No man, I need a calculator for that - now whats 23 divided by 2?!'
"Students are permitted to use calculators on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but because of the potential for cheating using infrared messaging, PDAs are banned"
Am I the only one that remembers using the ir port in the TI calculators?
I still remember the rather painstaking process of writing down many derivation and integration formulas into my TI85 graphing calculator. I justified it on the basis that if I was actually deriving or integrating in the real world, I'd have a book next to me anyway, while I still knew I was cheating.
In the process though, I got used to typing words and various macros into the graphing calculator, and over a break was able to make a fun little Might & Magic-style maze walking game using four images and a matrix for the maze layout. It's part of why I'm a programmer now.
So, even though it is cheating to use these tools in several situations- learning to cheat with such tools can be a useful learning experience in itself! As long as you don't get caught.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
The article mentioned cheating in the form of infrared messaging, but it would be much more than that if PDA's were allowed in the classroom. I know that back in high school, there were certain individuals who would "type" formulas or instructions into their calculator's memories.
Especially in Math and Physics classes, where you often use calculators in quizzes and exams, students would input formulas, walk-throughs of example problems and how to solve them, etc. It got so bad that the teacher eventually required everyone to show that their calculator's memory was completely blank (backup those legitimate programs...and Tetris...first!) before being allowed to use their graphing calculator on an exam.
The reason we were allowed to continue using calculators at all was because it took a LONG time to type in anything using the calculator's keys. Hunt-and-peck all the way. With a PDA, it would be trivial to type out everything on a computer and sync it to memory. Not to mention possible infrared communication between students, wireless connectivity to a network or the internet, or kids hiding programs like Derive or Mathematica (don't know if those actually exist on PDAs).
I'm all for demonstrating ideas in a visual way through calculators, but when it comes to being tested on your knowledge of the material, shouldn't students do things the old fashioned way?
I'd always wondered how long it would be before the companies that produce software like Mathematica and Maple would port their software to PDAs. When I went to college at Rose-Hulman IT we were all issued notebooks which ran Maple and CAD software. We used Maple in all of our Calc classes and were able to use it on tests once we proved our ability to do that particular type of problem by hand first. The CAD software could have easily been on higher power workstations. If Maple had been on our PDAs it would have lowered the cost of going to the college by a few thousand dollars (high end notebooks were really expensive back in '95, and sometimes still are)
The main problem is that PDAs were nearly non-existant at that time, but today I can see PDAs like the iPaq doing a grand job of running some of this higher end math software.
Of course cheating would run pretty rampant with wireless transmitting of email and text, not to mention the ability to store files with crib sheets on them. I'm still not sure how our profs back in the day thought they were ensuring that we didn't cheat on our calc exams back then. I think it was more of a matter of honor than anything.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
Welcome to America, where even our best students are utterly incapable of conceptualizing an ellipse!
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Does anyone here know how to use a slide rule?
My point exactly. While we may be able to figure one out given a few minutes, we certainly didn't grow up using them. If, however, the need arose, we could figure one out. Likewise with looking trigonometric values up in a table in the back of a book, just like the rules for differentiation by parts. Even if kids today aren't learning to use the tools that we used (our brains) to graph hyperbolas, that doesn't mean they won't be able to do so manually. It may take them a little longer (it would take us longer to use a slide rule) but they could get it. The important point is that they are learning the mathematics behind the concepts.
Liora
While I don't agree with calculators in the class room, I do appreciate the fact that the free market is causing the two technologies to become what the market is demanding. In other words, the technologies are becoming what people are looking for: a hand held or pda that calculates for you.
testing out my trending skills
I remember in third grade we were learning about temperatures, and my friend raised his hand and asked "what about when somebody says something is 35 degrees to the right? What does that mean?"
The teacher said "That's too complicated. You don't need to know that."
25 years later, I would wager most of the kids in that class still don't know what that means and don't care.
Every generation complains the kids are getting dumber, lazier, whatever. There will always be kids who are motivated and want to learn, and while using a PDA in class might slow them down, it won't stop them.
Among cruising sailors it is considered somewhat foolish not to pack a sextant and know how to use it. You'd hate to take a lightning strike 1000 miles from land and lose your GPS, RDF, Loran, or whatnot.
Maybe you'll be bad with the cheap sextant, but you should still get within 30 miles which will let you make landfall during daylight.
"When you have circles and ellipses, there is no way you'd be able to do this without a calculator," Jarvis said.
Ok...I know a lot of people don't need to summon Euclidian geometry from memory in everyday life, but the image of a kid in geometry class learning an equation thats been around for over 1000 years, and saying that level of math is impossible without a {graphing calculator, PDA} really saddens me. Especially since geometry is usually taught an at honors level - meaning the kids taking geometry are supposed to be the smart ones, on the fast track to college, etc. It makes me think that with all the technology readily available, kids will stop thinking and imagining and innovating.
I remember being in school when the TI's started to become popular. My feeling then was that ok, I've done these equations by hand...I've got a good handle on how to do that, and sometimes its a real PITA, so maybe sometimes its better to use the automated functions here. I still think that way -- I CAN configure SAMBA by hand, but there's a nice graphical tool that automates it, so that's simpler for me now.
I just hope with all the automation tools and short cuts technology can provide, we're not engineering out the human quality of wanting to know how things work.
So how do you tell kids today that yes, you can live without the latest gadget, and that it is important to master the fundamentals before you learn all the shortcuts?
I can see a time in the future when teachers will only allow certain "certified" calculators in their classes for tests. I know some professors allow you to only use equation sheets that they hand out for their tests. Maybe they should come up with a system where when you bring your calculator into the test they make you wipe the memory and then using some system download the acceptable functions onto it. Everyone would have the same functions so you would have to go back to writting the equations on the inside cover of your calc to cheat. ;)
I just graduated high school, yet never had a powerful graphing calculator (Casio's aren't terribly programmable). But everyone I knew who had a TI had no clue what more than half the functions on it did; they merely used them to play games (as the few who owned PDAs did). Unfortunately, their power is dulled by the fact that they are so slow; an equivalently-priced PDA can do the same types of calculations in 1/10th the time. (I can't wait to stick a Scheme interp. on my Zaurus!)
/not/ be used as learning tools. Kids learn to use them to do math, rather than the actual underlying concepts. Don't allow 4-function calculators until algebra; don't allow graphing calculators until calculus; don't allow scheme-based RPN symbolic integration magic twiddles until set theory!
PDAs are currently banned because they are "programmable". But so are all graphing calculators. On SATs, the only things that are banned are devices housing QWERTY keyboards, which most PDAs don't. Also, TIs can be programmed (and come with) more functionality than your average Palm. Even my Zaurus comes with only a 4-function calculator app!
Back on the topic of the CASIO, I left it at home nearly every other day of school, if even that infrequently. Yet I survived through every math and physics class often without it. Because of graphing calculators, most kids don't even know what a parabola looks like, let alone how to draw one. Most people even forget fractions and long division, and rather write the answer the calculator gives them, like "3.999999999" rather than "4".
Both calculators and PDAs are tools, and should
I use an HP48/49 emulator on my iPAQ.
The best of both worlds
http://www.epita.fr/~sebc/Emu48/
Someone once asked Einstein how many feet were in a mile. His response? "I don't know. Why would I clutter up my brain with stuff like that when I can look it up in any reference book in two minutes?"
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Yup, Columbine and September 11th pretty much did that. Too much fear of school hijackings and slaughter via compass.
Me too. Drafting requires some of this geometry by hand as well.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I just graduated high school and have always taken the highest difficulty math courses at my school. From Algebra II sophmore year to Caclulus senior year a TI-(82/83/83 Plus/86/whatever) was REQUIRED for the honors courses.
From my experience there are a few problems with the PDA-like functionality of a TI calculator. First, it is very easy to cheat on exams because it was relatively simple to program in formulas and equations for reference during a test and I even wrote programs to help with factoring back in 10th grade. Second, it was up to the student to learn the math. You could cruise through the course (except for Calculus) simply by using your calculator, but most of the students, including myself simply read the book. And of course, there are teachers who solved this problem by simply requiring you to SHOW THE WORK.
That said, the ability to throw the compass out the window and use the calculator made it possible to cover a greater amount of material per class. Instead of spending five minutes graphing a circle, we could do five different circles in those five minutes.
In conclusion, as with all technology in the classroom, there are pros and cons to its usage. I see the growing trend for PDA-like functionality in calculators as a way to expand the learning process for those who want to learn and making it easier for the slackers. In short, bring on the PDA-s!
I have replaced my TI-83+ with Power One's graphing calculator program. It has more features, and is much more flexible, than any TI i've ever seen. It graphs faster, and you can set each line on the graph to a different color so its easier to tell them apart (not to mention the higher screen resolution making the graphs more detailed). I love it.
The only problem teachers face is cheating. I could have stored my whole Trig textbook on my Clie (memorysticks rock). Yeah, you can write stuff in TI's programming menus, but its a pain. Not so with a PDF reader on my Palm.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
You have to wonder about the possibilities for cheating with these types of devices.
When I was in high school, the TI calculators that were programmable had just started coming out. There were several people who enter equations and other cheats into them.
Some teachers would not allow these types of calculators to be used, others would check before the test that they didn't have any equations or other types of cheats stored in them, and others would actually ask people to clear out all the memory in them.
Glad I don't have to worry about this any more. :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
And not differentiation?
I hear you man. I ended up programming my chem equations into mine in high school. Unfortunatly, (or actually fortunatly for me) i ended up learning the equations inside out in order to program them so they would work for any number of variables. ;)
I got so bored in my adv. chem class that i probably drew some of the first TI-85 porn. I'm not saying it was high quality having to draw with circles, boxes, and lines, but almost everyone in my classes eventually had the program on their calculators.
the TIs were just coming into use. I had a TI 81, and later packed "eight-deuce." Our teacher's and therefore my dependence on it definitely inhibited my understanding of the concepts underlying the math. That said, I can think of few situations in life where I would need but wouldn't have access to similar tools. Learning the tool allowed me to do more complex things that students probably didn't do as extensively before the advent of graphing calculators.
-------- -praktike
Man schools only allow certain calculators to be used on their tests, and for finals at my school, all memories were wiped or the calculator could not be used. This is also standard practice at the SATs, I believe
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The US Navy still teaches officers celestial navigation. This is still actively practiced on ships, junior officers plot the stars even when all systems are funtioning, to keep in practice. Exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Gyrocompasses can fail, so can satellite receivers, and if a freak fire or damage as a result of combat just happens to knock out the nav systems, at least the ship can still get home without sailing in circles until they run out of food.
Was english and grammar uninvented too?
Any spoon would be too big.
Circle: Use a compass. A compass is a simple tool that should be easier to learn than any calculator. (Adjust angle, stick pointy end into paper, draw.) And then all kinds of important tricks of geometry are possible, with just the compass - really only learnable with the compass in hand.
Elipse: put two pegs on paper, the chalk board, etc. Toss a loop of string around pegs. Pull loop of string tight with a pendic, chalk, etc. Draw with string kept tight. Lookie! an elipse! How hard was that?
I used my TI-85 to do all sorts of math, but I learned my math in books and on paper.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
Funny. I somehow manged to get through high school and 5 semesters of college calculus using graph paper to draw circles, ellipses, and other curves. How did I muddle through? I just don't know. Obviously mu edumacation suffered for it.
I spent the money on a shiny Sony PDA, and its sitting in its nifty cradle but, 5 years out of College, my trusty Casio graphing calculator is sitting on a stack of papers right in front of me.Big screen and easy buttons for all functions I need (no digging through sub-menus for them).
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
I use a HP48/49 emulator on my iPAQ,
r _e mu48.htm
the best of both worlds.
Screenshots at
http://web.jet.es/leobueno/imagenes_del_emulado
download
http://web.jet.es/leobueno/emu48.htm
First of all, if you have VIA on your MB, throw it away. Awful garbage, it infuriated me for years. /etc/X11/XF86Config, and see if you can kill X with that. /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt. If the kernel is even remotely alive, It'll listen to that (provided it's compiled into RHL. Not sure). /var/log/messages?
Second, try commenting out the "DontZap" in
Third, try the stuff in
Are you sure nothing interesting is left in
I guess I am of two minds on this. Certainly, there are legitimate uses for graphing tools. When you have a mathematically complicated function, graphing it to see the shape can be instructive, such as a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. (Yes, easy shape, but not intuitive to most high school students.)
However, in most cases, electronic aids foster weak learning. First, it discourages analytical solutions in favor of numerical solutions. Second, it impairs the formation of approximate quantitative judgment. (In this regard, slide rules are likely superior educational tools -- you have to know the differences among logarithmic, exponential, and linear responses.) Third, it inhibits the important skill of hand-drawing graphs. (Ok, on a PDA with a graph paper template, you have an expensive etch-a-sketch, but still...)
The biggest problem is that you cannot easily regulate what a device can do, therefore, students rely on a machine too soon after beginning to master a skill. Fifty years ago, or even thirty, science students were MUCH better mathematicians than they are now. On the balance, I think that reliance on calculators has atrophied the minds of two generations now, and it is time to stop the intellectual carnage.
ok, so my mom's an accountant, who can do math like lightning in her noggin.
:)
maybe I'm insane, but when I was in school, I opted not to use a calculator. they'd actually hand the damn things out. My mother's advice will always strike a chord or two with me:
You don't get to use a calculator until you've proven that you know the procedure
giving kids the fancy tool without first teaching them what the underlying theory is and what it means will do nothing but breed a bunch of button-pushers.
the cynic in me also notes that these same button-pushers are equivalent to users...a la BOFH (bastard operator from hell). Serves them right if they don't think beyond the input vs output.
note to educators: try teaching, instead of supplying fancy toys to make it appear that the students are covering more material. What good is quantity of material covered if its retention is near zero due to the fact that they have to push all the buttons instead of knowing the actual procedure to get the answer?
what happens if the batteries in the calculator die, or the sun isn't out?
You don't learn the basics of maths with a calculator, you just learn how to press buttons. Back in my day when I did O/A levels (that's exams at 16 and 18 for you Yanks, whatever you call them) calculators weren't necessary, were considered cheating, and any maths you did have to do could be easily done in your head if the exam/question was properly designed - if you found yourself having to divide 576985820 by 99.31467148 then that was a pretty clear sign you'd gone wrong somewhere - you'd be more likely to get 6e8 and 100 which is trivial. All questions in my O levels (calculators were allowed by the time I got to A and they didn't make a lot of difference because the exams were still being designed properly) resolved to easy numbers if done properly. Also exams are (were, at least) about showing your working, which you don't get from a calculator, and if the working was correct and the answer wrong because of some silly miscalculation you would only get penalised for that once - you'd still score most of the points for the question. If you shoved everything into a calculator and got the wrong answer, you'd fail the entire question - there was no way the examiner could know where you'd gone wrong.
Using a calculator for everything is just sad. If you're presented with a fairly simple calculation and you have to reach for a calculator, you'll just look dumb. Students - this does happen quite regularly in Real Life; being able to do maths in your head, even just approximately, is really an invaluable skill.
Can't believe I'm the oldest reader here. I remember the heated debate on whether slide rules could be used on tests. Portable, battery powered calculators where still a gleam in TI's eye. My dad used to do square root problems in his head to keep awake while driving... Soon the debate will be over if wireless devices connected to the Web will be considered essential (open Internet vice old fashioned open book).
NON-geek Linux user since 1998
The compass and protractor are as obsolete as the sextant. If a kid graduates from school and doesn't know how to work a PDA, he's going to quickly learn how to work a deep fryer.
Nice troll...
I suppose the PDA is only a requirement if you want to be a marketdriod. For the rest of us, thinking is going to be considered a valuable ability. Right now, a PDA is just an interesting toy, and many people somehow manage to exist and lead productive, organized lives without one.
For what it is worth, I am all for banning calculators from the classroom. Far better to be able to demonstrate the process by which the student arrived at an answer than to pull some magic number out of the air and expect full marks.
I just graduated from university a couple of years ago and calculation devices of any type were strictly forbidden in my math, statistics, and CS classes. Sometimes it was a pain, but then the answer was rarely expressed as an integer anyways...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
My sliderule never needs new batteries...
http://easycalc.sourceforge.net/
I have a Palm, a TI-86 and capable calculator software for my Palm. I carry my Palm around all the time, but would never attempt to use it for any calculations, simple or not. The form factor of Palms make them useless for data entry. The Palm is limited to grafiti and pecking with the stylus...either way, it takes two hands, and is clumsy and slow compared to the keypad on the TI-86. The Palm makes a passable calculator with my attached keyboard, but by itself, it just isn't very useful as a calculator.
As a note, with a keyboard, my Palm is a great tool for school; I can take notes all day...it would be nice if there was good free graphing calculator software that can replace the funcationality of the TI-86/89.
These things exist? Jeez, here I was thinking that there were more D&D players in the restaurant... stupid me.
Seriously though, you're shitting me on the tip charts aren't you?
Black and grey are both shades of white.
I'm a graduating senior in high school right now and I have to say I think that giving more and more powerful aids to students is a huge mistake. Graphin conic sections and functions on calculators is something a first grader can do, and unfortunatly they have about the same level of understanding of whats going on as the calculus students do. Sure the calculators can do nice complex operations that would take hours to execute by hand but doing this completly sacrifices the student's understanding of the underlying math in the problem. I say teach the simpler funcitons and more basic graphs, but have students do it by hand for the first half of each unit or so. This way they'll at least see that math is something people, not calculators came up with.
In '88 my chemistry professor allowed me to use a pocket computer as a 'calculator'. Granted, it only had a few Kb of data, but one can stick a lot of data into tight spaces. And, lately I was allowed to take my PDA into an exam that was open notes. So, is it what you know or how quick you can find it?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
The real problem with a PDA is that pr0n pictures look really bad on the crummy LCD displays. Once that issue is fixed, they will certainly become a huge distraction in class...
First, do any compainies actually require their employees to use PDAs? Second, even though it is important to have a good concept of what you are doing, it is actually nessasary to be able to do the mechanics. If you have no conception of what the right answer should be, you have no idea if the computer/calculator/PDA returned the right answer. Nor can you program the computer/calculator/PDA to do something new and interesting. Why should I compain though, if most people are dependant on their PDA's to do simple math, those of us who can do math will be very rich (cause you won't know if we are screwing you out of your money).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
It's not the kids that are smart enough to program things to help them cheat that I worry about graduating from school, it's the kids who don't know where the United States is on a map, can't read past a fourth grade level, and don't know which war won our (the US) independence from England that I am more concerned about (you know, the ones who end up on Jay Leno's "Jay Walking")- most of whom, in my experience, are not smart enough to figure out how to program a calculator or PDA to help them cheat at tests. JMHO
that dealt with this subject perhaps 20-odd years ago. The setting was a party where a showoff was demonstrating that he could add, subtract and mulitply without his calculator . "Of course, these are merely cheap parlour tricks," the other characters complained to each other.
"There is simply no way he'd ever be able to divide or extract square roots without his calculator!"
Yet another SF author accurately predicting the future.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Before we start, I must confess I'm a 3rd year pure Maths major, so I'm probably biased, but ...
At the end of the day, very few people will (directly) use a lot of the mathematics which they are taught. Basic things are useful, but for the most part people have no need for complex integration / graphing / (your maths topic here) in their everyday lives. Of course, if you're into hardcore financial derivatives or are working on a fluid-flow problem in Chemical Engineering, you will need these, but then ... that's not the majority of people, is it?
The value of mathematics (just like the value of most schooling) is entirely tangential to the course being studied: the learning lies in the art of learning - not the actual material covered. When you are doing maths you are learning to be methodical and to see different problems as resolving to the same base issue. Whether you can do that using numbers like 1 and 2 or can do it with e^0.1683 is irrelevant.
Similarly, I was horrified to discover that some high schools place ridiculous emphasis on nitty-gritty error calculation in science experiments - learning science (and many other scientific disciplines) at school is about understanding models, in a variety of shapes and forms.
Using a calculator removes step 1: actually visualising the problem. While on school exchange to the US in 1997 (I'm South African) I failed a Maths test because, in the words on my teacher, "I appreciate that you can solve the quadratic equation manually, but the calculator is faster". Needless to say, I dropped Maths (there) the next day. Ditto for Physics, English - the only courses I was doing by the end were History, Computer Science and the Theory of Music. These courses didn't have a "learn this or you are useless" attitude - the question was about learning, not regurgitating...
But then, I study Metric Spaces for fun - so my opinion probably doesn't count ;)
here
www.hpcalc.org has a lot more, look around. i also know for a fact there is a HP 49G emulator too for the CE -- i have it -- but can't find it at the moment. as for TI, i have never really liked them -- (read below) -- but i am sure they are abundant as well.
side note: HP calculators (with RPN (reverse polish notation)) kicks TI's butt in more ways than IE have security holes... use one and be amazed.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
... at all levels. In the early 90s I TA'd a course in statistical mechanics at Stanford. We got to the inevitable part where you have to calculate the expected wait time before all of the air in the room accidentally ends up under the desk. It turns out to be something like 10^130 seconds -- a very, very long time. The most common answer was "too long for my calculator", because after all most calculators can only go up to 9E99.
How annoying. You'd think they'd just switch to calculating the logarithm of the answer, or divide by 10^75, or something. But, no, "very big" was enough for most. These were Stanford students, too -- supposedly the cream of the (western half of the) nation's crop of students...
When one is learning basic arithmetic, no calculators of any sort should be allowed. Note: basic arithmetic includes square roots and percentages.
For more advanced courses, when one is presumed to know arithmetic, allow any NUMERIC calculator. Symbolic and graphing calcs should not be allowed. Yeah, you can use them in the Real World(tm), but in school you're not just supposed to be learning *HOW* to do this stuff, but *WHY* you do this stuff. The symbolic and graphing functions kill the second part.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I am an avid user of both my Palm and my TI-86. However, I did not learn geometry, trig, or even calculus on either; I learned basic math with the same Euclidean rules that have stood for millenia.
I remember back in high school. One time out of curiousity I asked my (I think it was Algebra II) teacher if he could teach me how to find square roots without a calculator. He didn't know offhand, and so I went to EVERY MATHEMATICS TEACHER and NONE of them knew how to do it. I finally found one person who knew how: the ancient librarian. She taught me, and I'm grateful.
Calculators are a tremendous help for solving things faster and more accurately. But if you don't understand what the calculator's doing, what good does it do you when you have to modify it a bit to fit a given situation?
What kind of an "educational" system is this where so many people are utterly incapable of standing on their own two feet without the support of calculators?
This is a really disturbing trend in math, and education in general. And it's only getting worse thus far.
-eosha
When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
PDA with wireless modem may allow ideal way of cheating in classroom. So I believe, PDAs may not be a great idea in classroom. However, if you want to replace your PDA with calculator, there are no restrictions. This means the advantage is in favor of TI.
here is the other one that does HP-49; :-)
gotta have the ROM though (though that can bo downloaded from the web too -- but not legally). I am less sure about this these days -- with DMCA and all -- would extracting ROM from your calculator be considered illegal?
http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=3666
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I have no problem with PDAs and fancy calculators in Computer exams, but for Maths exams you should be able to use graph paper and a pencil. The exam is supposed to be a test of your mind, not of your IT skills.
Assuming where talking about college or precalc and up. Everyone remebers the old TI-85's Visualizing is the most powerful way to learn. I jsut hope TI doesnt' loose it's foot hold. My old Palm Pilot with 2 megs will draft equations and I can usually find an app to do whatever I want. My question is when do you release MathCAD for Palm OS. no seriously.
No, as of December 2001, I don't think the College Board forces you to wipe memory, etc from your calc. Of course, they only allow certain calcs (no QWERTY devices...), and make sure you keep your calc inside during the verbal sections (oh...dictionary!), but besides that, you can pretty much put any math formula/custom func/custom program for the math section and get away with it.
Answer: Use a loop of string and two pins, as you said. Move the pins closer and closer. When there's room for only one, use that. You started with an ellipse, and ended with a circle. And hopefully you learned something about the two...
I would think that if the teachers would get off their lazy rear ends and walk around the classrooms during tests, it would do a lot to deter students from using pre-programmed banned formulas, or at least make the students very very nervous.
Another deterrent, I would think, would be to let the students know before the test that the pre-programmed formulas were banned, then, at the end of the test, or maybe at the end of the NEXT test, check for cheats. It would only take once, I think...
I'm probably just bitter because I never had a math class where graphing calculators were allowed. And I was slack-jawed at the previous comment referring to geometry as an honors class--it was required at the urban, 60% African-American high school I attended. Youse guys are making me scared to send my kid to public school.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Back in the day, my Dad got a degree in civil engineering. He was allowed to use a slide rule for many of his classes, even in high school. His dad thought this was inherently bad because it defeated the idea of learning to do the math by hand. Naturally, geometry, trigonometry and calculus didn't lend themselves (graphically) to a slide rule, but he could perform arithmetic calculations like a maniac.
When I went to high school, slide rules were out and calculators were pretty damn expensive, so in high school, everything was done by hand. I can do arithmetic calculations in my head like a maniac.
After about 18 years, I went back to college and got my electrical engineering degree. Not only were calculators cheap, but computers were cheap, too. I took Trig, three semesters of calculus, one of differential equations and one of statistics. I used the calculator and computer in each one.
Did it help? Damn straight! Did it hurt? No.
Here's what I think: the mathematical fundamentals that I learned were aided by the electronic tools. Sure, any monkey can poke the keys on a calculator or type in a Mathematica or Maple function, but, fundamentally, the student must have some degree of knowledge of the basics of what he's doing to know that the answer that comes out of the box is the one he wants. I don't know how many times I poked the buttons and watched the calculator or computer toss out the wrong answer because I typed something wrong. But I knew that the answer was wrong because my knowledge of math was such that I could estimate to a reasonable degree what the answer should be.
I do have to admit, though, that the string and two nail method of drawing an ellipse does drive home the idea of visualizing how the ellipse works (major and minor axes), but I'm most definitely a cheerleader for using calculators and computers to overcome the mundane mechanics of math. Not only that, but modern calculators like my TI-92 Plus do a great job of graphically modeling things like surface integrals. Computer programs do it even better. Tools like that allow students to progress many times further in their math "careers" than they might have if they didn't have those resources.
Fundamentally, though, and I suppose this is what you meant by the calculators and geometry comment, it's vital that a well developed, solid knowledge base is developed in the basics so that the resources become tools and not crutches.
-h-
It is strange that circles and ellipses were mentioned. Both of these functions are easily "visualized" using a piece of string and a couple of pushpins. Drawing a circle is easy; fixed length of string (radius) attached to a pin. Rotate string around the pin.
For an ellipse. attach the ends of the string to two pins (foci). Put pen inside string, pull taut, and rotate about the foci while keeping the string taut.
There are "tricks" like this that use string, pins, compasses, and rulers for other geometrical shapes.
I wonder if kids today get taught simple mathematical tricks. For instance, one can simply determine if a number is divisible by 3 by adding up the individual digits. If the sum is divisible by 3, then voila. For instance, 1872654. 1+8+7+2+6+5+4/3. Or more simply, 1+8, yes, 7+2 yes, 6 yes, 5+4 yes, so yes.
Want another one? What is 25*25? (2+1)*2=6. So the answer is 625. 55*55? (5+1)*5=30. So the answer is 3025.
"When you have circles and ellipses, there is no way you'd be able to do this without a calculator," Jarvis said. "It helps us visualize what we're doing."
We visualized landing on the moon before calculators. Get a grip, young man, and learn your trade before using crutches.
I can't understand what everyone is complaining about. Graphing calculators/ PDA's, although incorporated heavily into the curriculum, are only tools, not a means to pass off the thinking to a machine. I'm sure a similar debate took place when electronic calculators came into the school system, but what needs to be realized is their advantages. Work can be double checked easily, tedious processes sped up. Sure, some wise-guy could secretly hide L'Hopital's rule, or some trig identities in his calculator. But what is the problem, as long as he shows he knows how and when to use them? The easiest way to combat this is by teachers shying away from multiple choice math exams, and forcing students to show their work. Then, instead of spending time memorizing formulas, students can concentrate on the actual mathematic process. However, this is not to say that a student should not be self reliant. Anyone (Except some apparent technophobes) have other ideas on how to integrate (Pun not intended) these tools into schools?
Thank you for pointing out that visualisation is an important part of math:
:-)
Also, make damn sure you leave the money I gave you on top of the register until I agree that it's the right amount of change. This prevents "I gave you a $20! No you didn't, you gave me a $10!" arguments.
How much of these arguments would have been stopped in advance if people in the US were able to see the difference on a 1, 5, 10, whatever note by checking the colour of it?
Take the next step into evolution, colour your notes, and prevent confusion and unnecessary arguments caused by the fact that all your notes are the same colour.
After that it's only a matter of time before you adopt the metric system and your math will be easy again
bash$
HS senior can't visualize a simple conic section?
Shit I was graphing out one sheeted hyper-hyperboloids of one sheet when I was a sophmore. Isn't this kid kinda old to be just know learning analytic geometry?
I know this will get modded down as a troll, but whatever.
Listen, we have technology for a reason. In order to advance society we have to continue from where the last generation left off. I mean come on, it's almost the same concept as open-source. What if you were not allowed to share information? So you want to build an airplane? "Figure it out yourself, then you'll be a real airplane builder". Give me a break, if we did that then progress would grind to a halt.
Computers for everyone on their desk, fine. Of course, kids still need to learn, but what they learn may be different than what we learned. They have the advanage of learning from our mistakes and then continuing on and advancing life as we know it.
Oh and Goedels incompleteness theorem...
0xC3
Until TI puts a real time clock in its calculator, it won't come remotely close to being a PDA. It's rather odd that they sell an "organizer" application -- including a scheduler, no less! -- without this critical hardware feature.
Fancy graphing calculators are of no use, whatsoever, for cheating in the classroom.
I just (yesterday) graduated high school, as the math/computer whiz of my class. I have an uber-cool TI-89, which has functions beyond my wildest imaginations. And, until I know the concepts, they are utterly useless.
My TI-89 has the ability to do symbolic manipulation. It will do differentiation for me. Guess what? Until I was taught, by doing it by hand, what differentiation actually was, I had no idea what the calculator function did. I gave it an equation, it spat out something pretty, and I oogled over it, but it meant nothing.
Yes, once I learned what and how differentiation worked, I could stop doing it by hand and use my calculator instead. Am I to be punished for efficient use of time? A TI-89 is a great many times faster than a pencil.
As I said above, though, I am the math whiz. I got my first TI calculator in 6th grade, and explored them in and out. Even I, until I was taught the concepts, never knew the hidden potentials. Consider, then, Joe Average.
No, I'm not just making this up. Everyone, everyone, in my math class aside from me, had no idea how to use the calculator. Face it, slashdot is a techie crowd, and we bond with computing devices. Joe Average presses the buttons he has memorized, and if it doesn't work, has no idea. Joe then does it with pencil and paper.
Joe Average doesn't give two shits about the calculator. Built in functionality? LOL. Functionality isn't functionality unless you know both that it is there, and how to use it. I am the only person I have ever met who actually reads the manuals for my calculators; Joe Average only finds out about its abilities from their math teacher. Their math teacher doesn't tell them until they've had how to do it, by hand, driven into their skull with a sledge hammer.
Teachers control the calculators, people. Teachers control them, through ignorance. The average student remains in the dark about what their calculator can do, because the thing is incomprehensible to them. Could your grandmother teach herself how to program PERL? Would she?
The only other source of information on calculator potential is other students, who are frankly just as ignorant as their peers. Even those who are in advanced classes do not understand what goes on, and do not share what they know. To understand a calculator is utterly dorky, trust me. To teach your friends is worse, because you must bang the methods into their skulls by rote, thus also banging by rote your new social status.
Calculators are no threat to educational mathematics, because the education system does not tell you how to use them until they are no longer an advantage. Those few that learn on their own already understand the concepts.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
I remember looking through the manual of my TI (you remember, then half-inch-thick one?) taking note of what it could do. Mind you, this was during geometry (my parents figured they'd get me a graphing calculator early on.)
One of the biggest problems I had with it is that it would do the factoring of polynomials for me. You just put in [A]x^2+[B]x+[C] and it would give you all of the factors. Consequently, I was "solving" problems with imaginary numbers early on.
Eventually, I wanted to learn the formula that the calculator used so that I could do it for myself. Unfortunately, my teachers had no clue, and I didn't know how to get it.
The point of this long story is: I still don't know how to factor polynomials. And it's been a thorn in my side ever since.
char sig[120] = "\0"
Do we have to start misspelling color like "colour" before we do that?
And while we are on the subject, the letter z is pronounced "zee" (not "zet"), you live in an apartment (not a flat), and you ride an elevator (not a lift).
a pair of compasses draw circles
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They allowed us to use a graphical calculator in exams, like Texas Instrument's TI-92. Even in advanced math courses.
It was a new way to teach they were trying. But it was not easier because of that. The typical question was: "You have this problem, this is the answer. Now tell me how to get there (give the solution)." Your calculator don't give the solution, only the answer.
This way they knew if we understood what we were doing or not. No need to find extremums by hand and waste precious minutes on that task anymore: "You know you need a maximum? Ask your calculator, plug it in your solution and proceed to next step".
Anyway, why test if you can do something you'll probably never do again in your whole life after school (e.g tedious and error prone calculations/drawings by hand).
How many of you still do their plots by hand?
How disturbing.
I used to use a protractor and ruler to do geometry in school. Damned fine tools... capable of giving a more precise measurement than any calculator or PDA if they're really nice, and does something more than visually expresses the concepts; it gives you a hands-on feel. This contributes to depth-of-processing, which in turn helps aid memory.
Whatever... we already have cashiers who are incapable of performing basic arithmetic when the register dies, I suppose this sort of thing should come as no shock.
But then again, I have to consider the views of the ancient Greeks, as writing was becoming more popular. Some folks had concerns that it would prevent people from memorizing the old stories, since you could simply look up the stories in a book or something instead of having to recall it from memory.
This sort of thing seems to always happen with certain technologies. As they aid us, we lose some skills, only to gain new ones.
So... ideas as to what new skills we'll gain from these advances? Stronger fact-finding skills perhaps? A facility with logic? Better pattern-matching skills?
And so it goes.
It's still one of my favorite short stories, and still sends a chill down my spine.
It was first published in 1957(!).
-a
Do we have to start misspelling color like "colour" before we do that?
:-)
No, I spell it that way because that's how I've been taught to do it in highschool. Before that, it was "kleur" for me. I think it will be easier for you to recognise my "colour" as your "color" than it is to recognise my "kleur" as your "color"
bash$
If you can't do the math, no calculator can help you. Oh, it might make the difference between getting an 'F' and a 'D', but think back to your own math classes. Performing a finite integration to find the area under a curve between x=0 and x=18 is difficult enough.
Just require that the student show their steps in solving the problem. I don't care if the answer's right in a calculus class... I'm not there to teach arithmetic... were the steps used to solve the problem correct? Just because there was a silly addition error doesn't mean the whole problem get's no credit, and just because the answer's right doesn't mean it get's full credit either. A calculator can't help a student who doesn't know the intermediate steps to solving a complex math problem.
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
... how do you double the tax?
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
you very likely dont teach math.
...at least until it died on me in the middle of a Calculus final exam, losing all of my pre-programmed formulas.
TI calculators were required for the course and we were encouraged to program formulas into them. Unfortunately, when you fill up the TI-92 with formulas, it significantly decreases its battery life. And you can't hot-swap batteries without losing all of the porgramming.
I'd spent more time programming my calculator to do my problems than actually practicing the problems so I had a lot of trouble completing the final exam in the alloted time. The professor was less than sympathetic for tech-related problems and gave me a failing grade for the exam and the class.
Despite it's limitations, I still believe I learned more Calculus by programming the TI-92 to do what I needed it to do than the book taught me. It made the course more interesting by relating programming to math and even turned me on to other math packages. And the argument that using fancy calculators is cheating (or otherwise bad for your education) is a bunch of bull--no one does differential equations of any complexity exclusively in his head or on paper. Anyone who's using Calculus professionally is using some kind of high-tech tool to do it anyway.
When your studying engineering its something you just know. As much as I'd love to switch to the metric system, boy is it easier to use. If you use the standard system you should know that, I'd be depressed if any US college grad didn't know that. Oh well thats enought off topic though.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
I admit drawing elipses with a string and thumb tacks is important, but I remember when I learned about things like defining a parabola as the set of points where the sum of the distances to the foci are equal to a constant. The first thing I thought was "What do you get if you try to make the product equal to a constant instead?" Don't think you can do this with a string, but a graphing calculator was able to do it.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
When I was in high school we used graphing calcs, but I don't remeber math that we couldn't have done without the calculators. Maybe I was just lucky in the way that the classes were taught, but I don't think any high school math should require and/or allow the use of graphing calcs or PDA's.
Although, in college, that graphing calc became quite handy.
As for me, calculators were forbidden in my high school math courses, but allowed in science. At that time, though, calculators were pretty much useless for anything but simple math and elementary trig.
John
I don't know what all the cool functionalites a Palm or Jornada or Clie or Handspring has because I have never used one. But I will try to draw some of the similiarites.
The list could go on and on, but the bottom line is that if only now people are making these 'scientific' calculators more like PDAs, HP had already done this before and it's just more or less refining it with some 'extra' features. I'm still using my HP as a PDA.
Anyone else have any thoughts or care to share their experience with their HP.
By the way, reverse polish notation rocks
Recall that TI is releasing a calculator (Personal Learning Tool) with a desktop-like navigation system. That calc, if anything, shows how closely they're starting to come together.
At least it's built on TI-89/92+ architecture. I can play all of my games on three calculators now.
After rereading all your stories, I think I'll give the kid'll a slide rule.
John
Unfortunately, TI hasn't officially provided much information, but having been involved in the TI dev scene quite a while, I've had the opportunity to play with beta versions of these apps quite a bit. They're slightly limited when compared to Palm because they don't have touchscreen input, although the 92+/Voyage 200 calculators have a full qwerty keyboard. The software is quite nice, and I've been using it full time since my Clie broke a few weeks ago. I'll have the Clie repaired under warrantee, but for the target demographics of TI's calculators (mostly students), the Organizer software is more than powerful enough to make somebody who purchases one of these calcs reconsider whether they need to carry around a PDA as well. And trust me, consolidating the two devices and freeing up a pocket is definitely something to look forward to.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
The SAT does allow the TI-89, it's the 92+ they don't like.
If you have a real good one, you can look at Jon Barrett and watch him display his MAD SKILLZ at website making. ALL WHILE CHEATING ON A TEST!!! The endless possibilities make me SPOOGE!
Hello everybody,
h tml
Perhaps I am a dreamer, but since my first HP calculator I have allways dreamed for a device as easy to use as it, that it would be easy to program, with all the math capabilities it had.. and much more like a pocketpc..
Now this thecnology exist but it is focused in PDA for business people that want to keep their contacts and make some PowerPoint presentations..
But it is not all lost. I have discovered a new hope from linux on iPaq. Nowdays I am helping as betatester and spanish doc translations of a GPL project for C++ CAS (Computer Algebra System). It is in alpha stage, but it is quite useable, and its basic features are:
- Equation editor (interactive)
- Matrix writer and Spreadsheet
- Program with C like syntax
- Conections with Maple and Mupad
- Interactive geometry
-... and more
It runs on PC with Linux and MS Windows too..
Its creator is the same person who has developped hp49 and hp40 CAS, so he has experience about using this kind of system for learning, since he is professor at Grenoble University.
We share this vision about using this devices (or specific designed ones, as calculators) as a tool more for students, once they have learned the concepts. Perhaps with exams divided in a teorical part where calculators are not allowed and a practical part were you could use them.
But I go a step beyond. The cost of a low cost PDA with all this software and more (perhaps python, C compiler, or java,..) is less than a similar laptop or PC. I think this kind of devices could be a solution for people that can't earn enough money to buy a laptop and run Mathematica or Matlab on it to develop or investigate.. I think these devices are a great oportunity to third world countries to have great tools for new thecnologies learning and research..
You could see more about giac/xcas (the app I've talked) here:
http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/giac.
"Maybe I am a dreamer, but sure I am not the only one"
Have fun,
J.Manrique
jsmanrique_lopez@yahoo.es
I don't understand the nearly unanimous anti-calculator response. When I did school we were expected to SHOW ALL WORKING. So it didn't matter that we were permitted calculators: if you didn't show your working you get zero marks even if you had the right "magic number" at the end.
This was the case even in primary school (ie, ages 5-11).
If the calculator is showing the steps then good: it's time for people to move on and stop pretending that (for example) being able to do long division by hand is a useful skill. I wouldn't expect most children need to know how to light tallow candles or shoe a horse either.
A nice Bin/Dec/Oct/Hex/Sci/Graphing/trig/complex/color/GP L'd calculator for the Palm is Easycalc. Not the smallest memory footprint, but the features may justify the size depending on your needs.
For programming there are basic interpreters, c compilers, and a forth compiler (and undoubtedly others).
--Curby
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
I just graduated from high school. My mathematics classes have been using graphing calculators as a standard since sophomore year when I took Alegebra 2. We still are required to learn all of the formulas, and how to compute them by hand. Most of our tests have a calculator part and a non calculator part. The key steps in the calculator part do not deal with calculators at all. For example, when I took calculus BC my senior year, we would have to write out the integral first before using the calculator to evaluate it. This demonstrates the knowledge being tested as well as calculator proficency(which was required by the Advanced Placement tests we took at the end of the year).
People that say you need to be doing it the old fashioned way just think we are using only calculators and nothing else. That is not even close to the truth. Calculators are a valuable aid in a high school mathematics class and I could not even imagine what I would have missed out on if they were not utilized during classes.
????
Know how to use a PDA? aren't these things supposed to be easy to use; aasier than a deep frier even. I've burnt all sorts of things with a deep frier, but was able to operate the calculator on my PDA first try.
That said, this is dependent on the student using the calculator only as an _aid_ to learning, not a replacement for it. After I bought mine, I watched as students in courses as simple as (remedial) Algebra I bought 89s, and the calculators solved the problems for them. Then even students in the honors sequence bought them when first getting to limits -- and I do know quite a few students who didn't know how to do limits by hand, yes passed tests solely by using their calculators.
But for someone like me, who actually learns the concepts before resorting to the calculator, it's a great help. Got a tricky integral for homework that you're having trouble with? Check the calculator's answer, and often the "form" of the answer will hint at how to solve it, and the next time you have a problem like that, you'll know how to solve it. Does your homework have even-numbered problems that don't have answers in the back of the book? Use the calculator to check your answers, and if you know you got one wrong, you can go back and figure out why.
Fast forward a few years, and I've just finished up Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra at a well-known US university, and the calculator was still a great help. Test and Quizzes were all done by hand, so a calculator won't get you through the course. But I can now check my homework bit-by-bit as I go through it, so a little mistake in matrix multiplication in the first step of a long problem won't result in a completely wrong answer 20-minutes later. It's saved me a lot of time and a lot of frustration, and of course I learn where I commonly make mistakes and can correct them. And you can extend the geometry comment made by this teacher to higher level math, like graphing quadratic forms -- after solving one, I could graph it and see the eigenvectors/principal axes, the signular values, etc. And I was able to take some of those 3d shapes that I had to integrate to find the volume and use the 3d grapher to see what they look like. And the calculator has quite a bit of differential equation functionality that I don't fully know how to use yet, but no doubt it will come in useful in the future.
So the calculators in and of themselves aren't bad; it's those who abuse and overuse them. Can anything be done about that? Well, having calculators banned on all tests did wonders for my math-by-hand skills. Let students use the calculators when learning the concepts, but when it comes to testing their application of those concepts, make sure you're testing the student and not the calculator.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Frankly, anyone who would regard referencing forumulae as cheating is a poor excuse for a teacher. Who cares? Let the student look up the damn formula, already, like real people do here in the real world.
The best mathematics teacher I ever had was strict as hell, but when she gave tests she let students bring a single 3x5 card filled up with anything they thought they might need. Formulae, tables, reminders, tips--anything you could fit on there.
She also held timed open-book pop quizzes. Her reasoning was simple: the more time you needed to spend looking things up the less time you'd have to actually do the math. That policy encouraged students to remember those things they used most often without forcing them to fixate on memorizing every random thing that might be conceivably needed. Both policies also give students some reassurance that a random oversight or memory glitch won't mean failing a whole test.
Milhouse: Oh! Oh! Oh! "Low battery?"
Mrs. Krabappel [sighs]: Whatever.
Here is a great concept: Give the CD away. It's all about exposure for many independent bands. flightcloud.com is giving away CDs less S&H.
-- Buzz
I don't even HAVE a calculator. I just bring my neighbor's idiot savant everywhere.
SLOW change counting like that drives me NUTS! Who cares if it's slightly more correct, it WASTES TIME!
Does anyone remember the TI-92? That was like the ultimate nerd toy when I was in high school. I remember there was only about three people who had it in our entire school of perhaps 2000 or so.
:)
They were the envy of the entire nerd community and the rest of us couldn't believe anyone could have that much money to buy one (though undoubtedly it was the parents who bought them)... the rest of us just had our cheap 80 series.
I dunno though, it's kind of hard to imagine High School kids with PDA's. I mean, graphing calculators were bad enough, we knew it was a shortcut, but PDAs seem like overkill. Not that I would have turned one down in high school though
"Teachers leave us kids alone
If this wasn't a problem for us geeks 20 years ago, why is it a problem now?
And yes. I was a heavy duty PC4 user. Mine is dead now, but I keep it on my desk at work as a memento.
No Zen is good zen
PDAs, graphing calculators, and the like are effectively intelligence amplifiers. The key is to learn to use them well. Rather than forbidding kids from using technology tools, there should be classes just on how to use the tools properly. Same with the net, of course. A kid who can find data on the net has got a huge advantage in being successful over one who just blunders around.
There will come a time when an average human with the technology of the day will do better on almost any kind of test than a genius from 100 years ago. We should work to bring that future closer, not fight it.
Perhaps, but one has to sense a decay in society when, as really happened to me, a cashier reaches for a calculator to figure out my 10% discount (when I commented she must have gone to a public school she simply said she wasn't very good at percentages, I don't think she ever had a clue why I knew the discount before she did). Or when the register at the burger joint has to have pictures of the food on it so the monkey operating it can function, and how it terribly confuses them, when you see your total is $2.78, if you give them and extra 3 pennies rather than just $3.
One gets the sense that the school system is skimming over the basics a little too quickly, and I've heard too many kids state that they shouldn't have to learn basic math because the calculator will do it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What we REALLY need:
... optional java ..)
..
1. A phone no bigger in any dimension than a Nokia 8xxx
2. It should open up to a RIM style keyboard on one side, and LCD on the other (Nokia 9xxx)
3. It should have decent API's, with popular libraries / languages ( QT for GUI
4. It should have a decent processor
5. It should have one of those projected keyboards
That gives you a phone in your pocket, a PDA when you need one, and the projected keyboard gives TI enough buttons to start a major Math software company on the side
"cogito, ergo sum"
a good math test should not let students ace it with a calculator. In my classes, teachers take all points off if there is no work shown. Maybe its more work for the teacher, but it doesn't let the student get away with relying on a calculator. It means he/she has to know/understand the procedures rather than the buttons. For example, showing how they did the logorithim rather than displaying "4.1314512". When I took finals, where work shown did not matter, all I had to do was let the calculator do everything for me.
quite alot ppl think that TI-calcs ruin the learning process when students become too dependent on trying to find the anwsers with graphs. but im doing calculus in high school and use graphs mainly to check for anwsers. What most people are missing out on is the programming capabilities on the TIs. you can create simple programs that will compute functions otherwise extremely long and pointless. the language is very simple, (and if you want, u can always use ASM)and useful. Like in a couple seconds i can generate 4 lines of code that will fill a list or matrix with a sequence of numbers and generate the product of say every 3rd element. I also made a program that calculates the area of any triangle formed by the intersection of 3 lines. In doing so, it not only makes your life easier but also help you grasp the concepts when you program them. Its different from programming at home since i can do this when i get bored on math class or somethin. In this perspective, the TIs are far superior to the PDAs and do not make students dumber.
Great Atrocit
Like, why not just go straight cellular and connect to the internet or your home beowulf cluster?
Can students use their cel phones to call their life-lines during exams?
It is the ACT that does not allow the TI-89. The SAT allows the TI-89, however. Neither the SAT nor the ACT allow the TI-92. I know because I took the ACT two months ago and wasn't allowed to use my 89.
I just work it out the first few times, and when I have something complex(maybe the wrong word like sines, cosines, tangents, pi, or other interesting and insanely long numbers/ratios, I use a calculator. Also, I reccomend Easy Calc, for Palm. It's got a bunch of cool features, and it's GPL'd.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Some people will spend far more than 4 years developing their mathematics education. Some will take the Algebra class that ends with the binomial theorom (or even just quadratics), scrape through it, and that's the end of math for them. Others will have multivar, partial diff, number theory, and advanced linear. Different strokes, different calculating tools used, different reasons for using them.
I'm in the latter category, where the calculator is pretty much irrelevant for the math classes.
I use the calculator for *arithmetic*, and hardly at all for *mathematics*.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
your all missing the point. Any kid who wants to learn will learn. Could you imagine an intelligent math on the verge of learning, and then stopping because his calculator could do it? Of course not. The kids who will use the calculators for cheating and not learning formulas are the same who will forget the formulas the second of summer vacation anyways- This simply makes it easier for them to cheat, they would have anyways.
I was recently awarded the unpatent. Non-users of "the compass and geometry" must cease their inaction immediately, or I'll be forced to litigate.
True some people do over use calculators, but some aspects of modern mathematics are much more efficient when completed with a calculator. Secondly, you still need to know what most of these complex functions are and what they do before you can punch some numbers into the calculator
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
Some teachers would erease the memory before exams but I remeber one student who built a physics program that would take numbers for any formula and give you the answer.
Any formula? Perhaps you could feed in the low-energy behavior of GR and QFT, and it will return the theory of everything. It's clear he's wasting his time on physics exams when there are so many unsolved problems he could conquer with his universal oracle program. Quickly now, before it's erased by some ignorant teacher!
This happened to me about 13 years ago: only 10 days out of port and I was back to the clock and sextant I'd brought with me "just in case".
As a current high school student, I can say from experience that doing algebrea and graphing with grafiti sucks. I've played with the PowerOne Graphing calculator, and mathmatically it's as powerful as my TI-83+, but it's way faster to type in equations on a dedicated keypad DESIGNED FOR MATHMATICAL ENTRY than it is to either write it in or try to find the little popup menu on a 160x160 screen that has the sine function.
If PDAs are going to replace the calculaor, then they're going to have to be bigger to emulate the interface like those found on the Texas Instruments stuff. Closer to PADDs really..
In the business world, some understand this as well with IT. While computers are stated to 'increase productivity' many have learned that they merely increase the amount of work necessary to produce a computerized version of what was done on paper sucessfully for generations. The problem here is not the computer and often not even the IM system as much as it is the policy and policy makers. Those that learned the basics, but without being 'old and lazy' (sorry, couldn't think of a better way to put it) will understand the "why's" of performing their tasks and correctly use the computers and systems as tools instead of shaping their entire activities and business plans around and because of the very systems that are supposed to serve them.
If you chose to use fancy calculators, it is normally better to do so only if you are in a hurry and/or already have proven to yourself that you have a very firm grasp on how to do the operations without aid. If school was about learning anymore </sarcasm> then students would not have to be reminded of this. Instead it is about test taking and simply going through the motions. So, perhaps it is not bad that students use these aids and can hurry up and graduate so that learning may commence.
On SATs, the only things that are banned are devices housing QWERTY keyboards, which most PDAs don't.
But what about Dvorak keyboards?
After searching for a long time for a decent math program for both my Palm and my computer, I realized the main advantage of my TI-89 is its keyboard with 30+ keys devoted to commonly used functions and its streamlined menus and history that allow me to quick graph functions and work to find solutions, take derivatives, etc.
It's just too much work to enter equations on a computer, let alone a PDA.
Bah, all those people with their silly caluclators trying to do math. This isn't the way to learn. It is almost as bad as those infernal things known as slide rules. The worst crutch ever, one that has warped the minds of countless young students, is the satanic invention of pen and paper. In my day we had to do multi-diminsional calculus in our heads and we liked it.
Seriously though, all these are tools, nothing more, nothing less. This whole thread is equivlant to framers bitching about the use of nail guns and blaming their use for the fact that kids can't frame a square wall to save their life. The nail gun isn't at fault, it is the idiot who thinks that having a tool is equivlant to knowing how to use it who is. Fact is a nail gun does wonders for saving your elbow compaired to a hammer. A calculator does wonders saving your sanity when dealing with plug and chug problems like large matrix math. You don't see many people calculating by hand the 3d transformations for quake do you (yeah, 1 frame per year, smokin)
Computers were created for a reason: the human brain sucks at doing long involved calculations with perfect accuracy. So we invented a computer to do those things that we suck at. What a computer won't be able to help you with is to figure out what equations and mathamatical process is approiate for the problem at hand. DFA's lack critical thinking skills.
Professor W. taught the wave mechanics class at Caltech (this was fall 97). At one point he did a coupled pendulum problem which yielded 6/5 as an eigenvalue. He quickly whipped out the calculator from his shirt pocket.
"6...divide...5...equals...one point two!"
Everyone laughed. He looked up.
"What?"
(n/t)
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Thank the lord someone caught this. These people are talking about "when I was in college" and all that, when it sounds like they're sixth graders. For the love of God, people, learn to spell with somewhat basic proficiency.
The kid should have a slide rule too, for sure. And an abacus. And a multi-cpu system to play with those parallel linear algebra routines...
Show that the definite integral of f(x) = sin(x) / x from - to + is .
As long as the user was the person who wrote the code I don't have a problem with it.
I wrote programs for my calculator for use on tests all through high school. It wasn't a big deal. I found that I ended up learning the stuff better because I had written a program for it.
I would be lost without my Handsping since all my addresses, emails, games, and appointments resided in it. On the other hand, I would be lost without my TI-89 with its mathcad capabilities and matlab syntax. I dont think pda's will ever replace calcs because of the cheating capabilities. however pda's have carved themselves a niche in the world and i doubt we will see either go away for a long time.
"If nothing else, value the truth."
Sand off all the letters and use the Dvorak keyboard layout. When told that's not allowed simply say "You use it".
You can all use dvorak, can't you?
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
most kids in precalc/trig and some in calc do not even know how to divid fractions!!
dang calculators i wish we could bann them
I *NEVER* understood what the big 'fuss' about PDA's was, in the first place, especially that incredibly lame PalmOS crap.
...
To me a "pda" (particularily the palm variety) is just an oversized calculator.... we've been able to do that kinda stuff for MANY YEARS, so why were palm's so "amazing" in the first place ? Cos they look sexy ? I dunno
I'm sorry but I simply don't get it.
can somebody please tell my why and how a palm PDA is actually any different to the technology that's been in existance for many years now ?
I don't want an engineers reasons to why it's so "cool" or "different" cos I really don't care about that... what I'm talking about is functionality wise.
We've had notepad for MANY YEARS
We've had calculators that can code BASIC programs on them for MANY YEARS.
We've had "organisers" for MANY YEARS.
We've had "to do" lists for MANY YEARS.
Heck, you could even code this stuff into a calculator if you really must. It's not difficult. certainly not if you can code games on it.
So can somebody please explain to me what the big "fuss" is about when it comes to palm and palm os ?
I really don't get it.
And please don't tell me that it's all because of a stupid pen that breaks or gets lost in five seconds. ugh....... cos if that's the case then you're (mortal human's) more stupid than I thought.
Aren't the 89 and the 92 the same thing with different keyboard layouts?
The shareholder is always right.
If it's any consolation, I'm american and I prefer colour over color. It just looks more natural. Same with armour over armor
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It's usually thieves who make the "I gave you a $20" argument.
I guess what I really don't understand is why anyone would give a closed-notes test in subjects like math, chemistry, or physics. Are they under the illusion that students will retain the memorized formulas forever in their brains? I want them to understand the concepts. They can always look up the details in a book when they need them.
Some of the math teachers at my school actually require their students to buy a certain fancy, expensive calculator (TI-something) that has symbolic math and graphing. Costs something like $300. One of them came by my office and tried to convince me to require it for my physics courses too. That was the first time I'd heard of a calculator that could do symbolic math, so I asked her to demo it for me by solving the equation V=IR for the variable I. Fifteen minutes later, she was still fiddling with pull-down menus and muttering about having to reload her settings.
It doesn't matter what tools you use. It doesn't matter what you've memorized. What matters is what you understand conceptually. There's no substitute for that.
Find free books.
I'm a guy that always cheated on his calc homework with Mathcad. I learned more than most because of this. Let me explain.
The first few classes I used MathCad were all math classes. It was great. I fed in my problems, it fed out answers. As for the exams, I did C work. I got a B+ for the class for homework done well. (I'm leaving alone the issue of homework as a grading tool).
Then I hit pchem. A whole new story. The professors would give us the end result we wanted, but the assignment was to prove the solution. So I punched in the integral into mathcad, and I found mathcad just spit out the answer with no explanation - it just went strictly by tables for some of the more advanced stuff. EGAD! Suddenly I had some ball busting to do!
There is no problem with allowing technology into the classroom, as long as the teacher ups the ante to make sure you have to go beyond what it is capable of.
Just my 2 cents
The button on my TI-89 is marked "ENTER", and there is an app that allows you to use it in RPN mode. I find it's _much_ faster than my HP48G+.
Well in my calc class we worked with and without calculators. The first few days of any new subject we didn't break out the calculators but instead did things by hand and learned how to do things. We then learned shortcuts and how to do the things on the TI-89.
Each unit (roughly a normal chapter size) we had a take-home test where we were partnered with a random person in the class in which we could use calcs and consult friends. Then we had an in-class exam which was no calcs and was hard as nuts.
Class average on Take-Homes was an A- and class average on the In-Class was probably a 60. Sounds bad, but remember our school's policy in AP classes is to "celebrate 60s and weight the hell outta them with extra credit assignments".
I sometimes volunteer tutoring high-school and middle-school children. I have, no kidding, seen kids use a calculator to multiply by powers of 10. Sure they know how to do it (I hope), but they INSTINCTUALLY reach for the calculator instead of taking the .5 sec it takes to do it in their head. And don't even get me started on their inability to understand the CONCEPTS of trig.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It is readily apparent that most of the posters on this subject were in school decades after myself. In my high school my math class was taught to use a slide rule, the first TI Calc had just been marketed and all it could do was add,sutract,divide and multiply.
In latter years in Naval Nuclear Power School we were allowed to use scientific calculators so long as they could not store data (move up to HP-15C).
Having just recently been through a certification course from my state, one fact became apparent. Those younger guys in the class were unable to do simple math even with calculators. It seems schools no longer teach fundamentals, that is anything more than plug and chug. Most of them couldn't understand Algebraic manipulation of a standard equation. Certainly there are bright individuals today that can do math, but what is truly sad is most people under the age of 30 can not.
I still have the HP and it still runs on the original batteries from 1985
Matt's addition to Occam's Razor:"The most simple answer is preferred by those that are simple."
I said something similar in another post, but what the hell, it's better here... there is an app that allows you to use your TI-89 in RPN mode. And the ENTER button is marked ENTER - not =. ;-)
Graphing calculators and high-powered math software on computers can be a useful aid to learning, but only if the teacher sets the class up in a way that forces the student to really learn the math. Unfortunately, all too often that is not the case.
I took calculus the first year my university offered a section with Wolfram's Mathematica software as part of the course. For the first three terms of the course, our instructors taught the class pretty much the same way they'd always taught calculus. We did everything by hand in class for the most part. We'd use calculators if a lot of arithmetic was involved for some particular task, but for the most part it was just pen, paper, chalk, and chalkboard. Our homework was divided into ordinary homework intended to be done by hand and a set of problems we were expected to solve with Mathematica. All of the Mathematica homework problems we did were story problems and we always started with a blank Mathematica notebook and wrote all our own code to accomplish the task.
For the fourth, and final, calculus course our instructor continued teaching the course as before except that our Mathematica assignments came in the form of pre-fabricated Mathematica notebooks. Each notebook had explanatory text with example code interspersed throughout that we were suppose to run, followed by exercises at the end that we were supposed to solve on our own. This was no big deal for any of us in the class since we already had a solid understanding of the fundamentals of calculus and we all knew Mathematica quite well by that time.
The university started teaching many sessions of calculus with Mathematica and used the pre-fab notebooks from day one in all the new courses. I was hired as a "help desk" employee for the mathematics computer lab and worked there throughout the rest of my college career.
For the first year or so when most of the students in the classes had just switched over from traditional calc courses into the Mathematica courses, nearly all of the questions I was asked dealt with basic issues of using the software (syntax errors, printer problems, user interface issues). The students understood the mathematics.
Later, when we started having students in the lab who had been using the pre-fab notebooks from day one, more of the questions revolved around the mathematics. These students were cutting and pasting code from the examples and making slight modifications to solve the homework problems. In general, they had only a cursory understanding of what it was that they were really doing.
Eventually, they started having class in the lab. When that batch of students arrived, it was entirely clear to me from the questions they asked and the frequency with which they asked them that they had no clue what they were doing. They could get by cutting and pasting, except for the few problems that required something more than the cookie cutter approach. Then I'd have to sit there and dutifully employ the Socratic method with each of them to guide them toward some understanding of what they needed to do. Even then, they still didn't get any lasting understanding of the concepts. They'd been trained to just follow the few algorithms they'd learned rather than the more useful approach of deriving an algorithm from a fundamental set of ideas.
when i was in high school, a long time ago, we had to learn the old fashioned way on a piece of paper with a protractor and many formulas. giving kids TIs to use that act like PDAs is not the solutions. if they do use any technology, give them a plain scientific calculator so they can do the math in the formulas. if these kids are the future programmers, they need to know how to work out a problem, and not take an easy out and learn nothing at all.
"Knowledge is from books, Wisdom is from experiences"
Games can even be loaded onto the devices.
Whoa, wait a second! Isn't that what they're for in the first place? I'm pretty sure the ability to do math is just a side effect of being in-class gaming machines.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
then dedicated high-end calculators will disappear. I've just read that the Palm is planning $100 PDA. With a sufficently fast processor (like ARM 200Mhz or higher), large display, and good math software, why would I want to buy a high-end calculator?
Forget the entire contraversy.
Most branches of math have been taught for centuries before calculators were even invented.
No math student should an advantage over another because of a better calculator, at least not on an exam.
Do we have to start misspelling color like "colour" before we do that?
You're already mispelling it. Colour is the proper way to spell the word. You can thank Webster for screwing that one up.
And while we are on the subject, the letter z is pronounced "zee" (not "zet"), you live in an apartment (not a flat), and you ride an elevator (not a lift).
It's not pronounced "zet" in any English speaking country. It's "zed", dumbshit.
How much of these arguments would have been stopped in advance if people in the US were able to see the difference on a 1, 5, 10, whatever note by checking the colour of it?
Not many. I'm Canadian, and we've always had coloured notes:
$1 - light green (Queen, now a coin)
$2 - light brown (Queen, now a coin)
$5 - blue (Laurier)
$10 - purple (MacDonald)
$20 - dark green (Queen)
$50 - red (Mackenzie King)
$100 - dark brown (Borden)
I've seen arguments which go something like this: "I gave you a 20", "No you gave me a 10", "No the damn bill was green", "No, it was purple".
The argument shifts from what demonination of currency to its colour.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
"We've gone far beyond the C-word -- calculators -- into computer-like technology," said Richard Schaar, president of TI's education business.
A few minutes later he realized that "computer" is also a C-word.
There's an article about the evil of barbie here, including the 'math is hard' bit. The Simpsons episode (514 1F012 Original Airdate: 2/17/94) was social commentary.
I just finished my trig/precalculus/basic calculus course. My observations:
TI-89's will do the math for you.
TI-83's will signifigantly aid, but will require understanding of the problem and concepts to use.
PDA's will provide for battleship after tests are done, and will get a second glance from everyone in the room.
Seriously - I had a little PDA app for my 83, but got rid of it because I didn't want to type on that non-QWERTY keyboard in the middle of English class and look like a freak. I used pen and paper and did it in a fraction of the time. For high schoolers, the minute you've got a QWERTY keyboard or a stylus input your new toy is officially outlawed from standardized testing like the SATs and ACTs.
Another thing: our teachers don't quiz over stuff we can do on a calculator. That means stuff like identities and variable equations (instead of ones with nice numbers). Doesn't help much to use a calc on those.
I don't think PDAs stand a chance against TI.
Elect a democrat to office.
You know this reminds me of a math class in high school, that calculators deprived even the teacher of some knowledge in their lazyness. I asked the teacher, well, how do you figure out Sine, Cosine, and Tangent values of angles by hand? The teacher looked at me like I was stupid and responded, "What do you mean? Just hit Sin(x) to get a value on the calculator". The teacher just didn't get it when I said that trig was around before a TI-86, and I wanted to know HOW to figure out those values. I later figured it out with a book, but they should have known.
The same teacher didn't know how to show me how to find the sqrt(x) for a number like x = 2. He just said to punch it in again. Again, I quickly figured it out without too much problem on myself.
As a FINAL stupid thing that a teacher didn't believe, was Euler's Identity (yes this teacher was a retard), because he said that you can't take the Log of a negative number, which you really can't, but I did it anyway on the calculator (or something like this, it's late...), and got -pi*i. Quickly solved it around and god Euler's Identity, which he thought was just a calculator fluke and that the whole equation was bogus, anyway, the school systems in NC are great aren't they...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I first became interested in programming after seeing downloading a snake game onto my TI-83 in grade 8. It was non-assembly, so the source was visible, and I became greatly interested in the concepts. I learned most of the programming concepts that I still use today by screwing around on it during french class (although my french average dropped from an 85% to a 60% in the last two years). That crappy little TI-BASIC (language?) was my introduction to what is one of my favourite hobbies today, and possibly my future career. Even after learning some higher level languages, I still like to go back to the TI every now and then (during comp-sci class, as it is more interesting than this "OOT" shit-language they teach) to work in a simple environment. Of course, the real reason that I still program it, is that if I want to play any games on it, I need to make them myself (I fatally short circuited the link port by sticking the free end of a link cable in my mouth and pressing send on a dare).
The 92+ has a larger screen, too, but otherwise yes. The 92+ is outlawad because of it's QWERTY keypad.
whatever you get the machine to do for you - you pay for in letting your own ability to do it atrophy.
If you never learn it manually and always have a machine do it for you - then you're slave to the machine.
once you've Learned It without the machine, then the machine becomes an aid. but if you never actually learn it yourself, then you're slave to the machine.
once you know how to do it manually, then there's a place for letting the machine take the drudgery out of it for you - that's what computers are for after all.
but how many times have i been to a store, and the cashier didn't even know how to give correct change when the register doesn't tell them the right amount!?
john
Well, a good reason for kids to use a PDA is the great ability to transmit test answers via the infrared port. A lot of geeks I've known have busily beamed test aid through their line of sight impromptu networks.
And of course, you can store all sorts of things in the memory itself.
> Gyrocompasses can fail, so can satellite receivers...
Windows NT can try and divide by zero...
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Perhaps the questions students are being asked to solved are becoming more like real-life situations, and therefore more complicated and less easy to put together with pen/paper? This would be the mistake of those providing materials, rather than the 'weak-minded' students - and lets be honest, its too easy to point at high school geometry students, tell them they're stupid because they can't do it the way we did it (5 miles uphill both ways). When you're first learning this stuff, though, and you're being asked to graph something that isn't easily-rounded and therefore easy to do in your head or put on pen/paper, it can be challenging, and daunting to the kid who doesn't see why he needs to learn math.
I guess folks who play tabletop roleplaying games can call us weak-minded because we don't use our imagination to play games?
Moo
PDA's should be allowed EVERYWHERE. I mean, the only kind of porn I can look at on my calculator is ASCII porn, and that's not quite as good. It does the job, but let's go ahead and step into the 21st century here.
Among cruising sailors it is considered somewhat foolish not to pack a sextant and know how to use it.
Ouch! I hope the sextant is lubricated!
My calculus courses heavily involved calculators, as part of a "reformed" curriculum (in my case, the Harvard Project -- I was at an inexpensive state university, though =-). I was also a tutor and grader for these courses, and am now a Ph.D. student in math. Here's what I saw:
1) lazy teachers don't like new books because they have to (at least should) redesign their lectures.
2) lazy teachers don't like redesigning their assignments and tests around calculators, either.
3) good teachers aren't lazy.
The teachers (professors, of course) who adjusted to the new books and calculators were fabulous and we loved them. Even though they made us work *very* hard. Exam questions were rewritten to make the calculator's strengths irrelevant. When this couldn't be done (take for example some simple skills work that had to be done at least once), the profs didn't find it difficult to defeat TI's numerical algorithms (think about ill-conditioned matrices, for instance). Symbolic solvers can be defeated, too, as anyone who has logged enough time with Mathematica or Maple can tell you (and probably give an example if they worked on such systems recently =-).
In the end, math==thinking and the rest is accounting. Although some profs were slow to agree, everyone eventually admitted that the skills work is important only up to the point that you'll actually use those skills. Long division is an algorithm worth knowing and understanding, but doing it quickly and accurately by hand is a skill that is largely useless today. Graphing real-valued functions with one or two dimensional domains gives very valuable insight into the methods of elementary calculus ("problems which can be seen are problems which can be solved"); but doing it repeatedly once you've mastered the technique is a waste of time.
Once you've identified the appropriate backgroundskillset (some of which might include mastering calculator use as well as computer programming), you can put your time into the most important skill in math: critical thinking.
-Paul Komarek
They would post in their programs on ruled paper, typists would type it in verbatim, the program would be run through the compiler and the error listing would be posted back to the students.
Turnaround time: 2-3 weeks (mostly in the post).
They learned to check their code before submitting it :-)
Alas, recently the department announced that extramural students must have access to a computer now, so those days are gone.
With instant feedback from compilers, people have no pride in their code ;-)
People can read faster than they can listen. Some material benefits from audio or graphical presentation, other material is fine as text.
Can you imagine slashdot or another web site as accessed via a telephone (press 7 to hear the next comment... press 9 to visit the goats.cx link...)
Is a pound a unit of force or a unit of mass? In engineering it is generally force, but by law it is mass, and it was created for the law not for physicists.
And damn, that's one of the useful ones! When writing a video game you can actually use that (for working out where the ball is going to land).
Trig, geometry and vector/matrices are similarly useful.
I don't think I've ever used calculus for anything much in the real world. Why does it get given so much emphasis at school and university?
In New Zealand and Japan, the staff in restaurants get paid to do their job. So they do it, no bribe required.
Does your calculator say how much is required to tip a congressman/senator? :-)
Also, tax is included in the bill. It is not considered to be optional, so there is little point in breaking it down. What next, itemised billing for the cost of the food, rent overheads, protection money (in certain countries/cities) etc.?
Or can you claim back the tax you pay on food somehow? (Thus rendering my last paragraph facetious).
The story set me thinking and wondering if anyone else is in a similar situation. (Preface: I work in modelling of medical data.) I do a lot of math but I don't even own a calculator. About once a month I have to pull up xcalc or borrow one. I'm either estimating orders of magnitude or to-within-about-a-factor-of-two, or else the problem is too hairy for anyone with a handheld calc to ponder and it does really go into an SMP box or beowulf cluster.
So perhaps more important than "Are the kiddies learning to do math sans calculator?" is "Who's teaching the kiddies to estimate?"
Yes, my grandad bought me a circular one for my birthday :-)
And knowing about logarithms turned out to be useful when I was writing some code than needed quick multiplies on a 65816.
Of course nowadays processors even have a built in multiplication instruction, making such techniques less useful.
And my boss laid out both "tips" for me-
yep - keep the money where they can see it (sometimes people forget! And other times they are trying to stiff you.)
And count it out.
THe third trick is knowing how many pennies to ask for so they only get (in america) silver change...
But these days yr lucky if the person behind the cash register can even greet you properly.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
At my sons school, where a TI92 is required, for certain classes and exams the proctors insist on flushing the calculator prior to the exam to insure fairness. If it were a PDA he would have lost tons of critical information the school has no right to destroy.
So it's started already... with compasses and protractors. From observation of such sent-back-through-the-wormhole documentaries from the future as Star Trek and Babylon 5, you'll be able to determine at what point the uninvention of fuses, fire extinguishers, money and fashion sense occur.
And probably plenty more I'd not thought of...
PDAs! Yikes, doesn't that open up new avenues for *cheating* !? At least with calculators, a wise instructor can design the test problems so that the calculator is of little actual help, and that conceptual understanding is what is being measured.
With a PDA, you have the risk of the entire class linking up to the nerd who actually worked problems and listened in class.
The TI-81 family does not often set the vertical and horizontal scales the same way. That means a line with a slope of 1 may appear at 30 degrees, or 75, or almost anywhere except 45 degrees. Similar stuff happens to circles - can someone explain how this is helpful to an innumerate user?
Getting any sane answer at all assumes the user chose the right alculation to start with, then keyed the whole thing correctly. If you haven't already worked the answer out in your head, more or less, how can you possibly trust the machine's result?
I go to University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and I can honestly say that I haven't taken a single test for any technical/math class that was just regurgitating information. In fact, a lot of people that used to be in my program (computer engineering) have since transfered out because the theory was too dificult. Now High School was a completely different story... everything before college really was just memorization, which is kind of sad. I don't want people to go to school so they learn how to memorize, i want them to learn how to THINK. Unfortunately, I've only run across a handful of teachers that can actually teach those skills. Well, time to get off my soapbox and end my rant, but my original point is still valid, there are places out there that don't teach by rote memorization, but rather by theory.
This will probably get modded down to -1 in no time but for the few who do get to read it.... Here is my weblog rant from last year as "Back to School" specials were appearing in the paper.
August 26, 2001
Calculator Rip Offs
OK. Let's talk about a scam that's being perpetrated on households across America (and probably lots of other nations as well) at this time of year. That scam is... the handheld calculator.
When I opened up the paper today and I saw not one, but two different office supply stores offering the HP 12C calculator for $70 my eyes popped out of their sockets, rolled across the room, and spontaneously started trying to bounce up and down on the 9, 1, 1 buttons on the phone to report the robbery. This is a calculator that cost around $100 the first year I attended college and I purchased my HP 11C (basically the same calculator but the 11C has engineering oriented functions rather than financial functions). That's 18 years ago people! Can you think of any piece of electronics in existence that hasn't either gotten massively faster and more capable or else had its price plummet in 18 years?!?
That is pure unadulterated bullshit... But it's not like the 12C is alone in its mystical fantasy pricing world. Just look at the prices on calculators like the TI 83 Plus. This is a calculator with a "large" 64 X 96 display (6,144 pixels) and 24K bytes RAM (160K bytes of data archive and application space). It costs almost $100 dollars? What?!? A Palm M100 with two megabytes of RAM and a 160x160 (25,600 pixels) costs $129 and that's probably too high!
Folks, you are being ripped off! Do not buy an expensive scientific graphing calculator. Your child will probaly not even be able to run it anyway. Do not buy into this magical pricing system. Buy a reasonably priced scientific calculator like the HP 30S and if the kid needs to do graphs, get him or her some software for the computer. If you absolutely have to have something that the child can take to school, buy an inexpensive PDA and find some software to put onto it to get the capabilities the kid needs. If the software hasn't already been written it should shoot to the top of the must-write list for open source software groups in order to break this ridiculous TI, HP, and Casio theft ring.
Sigs are for people who started using the net _after_ '86.
PDAs and CellPhones merge into a hybrid device.
PDSa and calculators mergs into hybrid devices.
Does this mean I'll have reverse polish notion on my cell phone? PLease say I will, please!
emit doog 008 1
Windows NT can try and divide by zero...
Will somebody mod this brother up?
- Dan I.
My abacus is sexier than your sliderule
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
Because if the carry some of the more useful numbers around in your head, and can do math without a calculator, you can at least estimate things on the fly, and incorporate actual data into conversation. (Which numbers are actually useful depends on your field: maybe it's feet per mile, maybe it's drag coefficients, maybe it's IP addresses.)
Why spend two minutes looking it up and another minute typing itnto a machine when you are already interfaced with a perfectly good data processor?
Myths are things that never were, but always are.
says that one pound = 0.45359237 kilograms exactly by law, so it is a measure of mass; at least if you are trying to sell someone a pound of bananas. Note that your scales must support metric unless you want the trading standards folks to make an example of you.
The big underlying problem here is that the math curriculum was designed for the things that are easy to do with graph paper and pencil. Hence the odd obsession with parabolas. New technologies make new kinds of math content learnable. But revising the curriculum for either new tech or old tech doesn't answer the more fundamental question:
Why do we want kids to know this math stuff again?
Do we have specific things we want them to be able to do? Which ones and why?
We should really use that as our guide to curriculum reform, not what either new or old tech can do. And once you answer that more basic question, then whether it makes more sense to use PDAs or calculators or slide rules starts to be easier to sort out.
a little clarification:
Why? Slide rules require you to know what you are doing while you are doing it, and don't allow one to mindlessly plug numbers into a calculator and accept whatever garbage comes out the other end without exercising their own judgement.
Now, assuming that it is possible to operate a complex graphing calculator mindlessly, then that means that just about anybody can use one with ease, which as everybody who's helped a friend of a friend of a friend fix their computer knows, is not true. If they were to just number crunch while brain dead, then considering the syntax of some of the higher end models, they wouldn't be taking any real advantage of the capabilities of the calculator and would thus be doing the same as using a tradeshow calculator (you know, the ones you pick up at tradeshows).
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
I am still looking for a PocketPC/Palm/Psion emulator for the TI calcs, but here is a link to a PDA emulator for the HPs. IMHO it seems best to emulate the calcs on the much more capable PDA, rather than buy a calculator. Pity the calcs get much better battery life. Bugger! http://nt.marin.esc.edu.ar/jpla/emu48ce/emu48ce.ht ml