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?"

Comments

Re:Raising the bar - sextants

[victim]

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.

Re:A couple of thoughts

[SMN]

The TI-89 and TI-92/92+ and the coming TI Voyage 200 (a souped-up 92+) all run plain vanilla 68000 processors at either 10 or 12 MHz. These have no math coprocessor, either; all floating point math is done with 10-byte BCD numbers and software. And the CAS on these calculators is a scaled-down version of Derive (both were designed by Soft Warehouse, Inc, which TI has since bought out).

So a powerful CAS is absolutely possible to run on PDAs, especially ones with ARM processors. It's just not too easy to write a full-fledged symbolic CAS, so nobody's gotten around to doing it yet. But it's entirely possible.