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

other conflicts?

[jglow]

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.

Re:other conflicts?

[quantaman]

In Alberta all high school students now use TI-83s (might be 83+ now). 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. Now in university virtually everybody has these same calculators and we are allowed to use them in exams. Although I don't know of any specific circumstances I would not be surprised if someone had some programs on their calculator which gave them an "advantage" during exams. Using some cords and programs you could also hook these calculators up to your computer and get programs off the web.

News flash...

[drrobin_]

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.