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Flash Drives On a Calculator
aawm writes with the following news for graphing calculator fans. "As the result of a group effort between Michael Vincent, Brandon Wilson, and Dan Englender, msd8x v0.94 has been released, which allows you to use ordinary USB flash drives with a TI-84 Plus. With the appropriate cable, you can browse, modify, and copy (in both directions) files between a flash drive and the 84 Plus's RAM and/or archive."
I recently graduated with a BS in Mathematics. High school was not very long ago, and there we were required to use graphing calculators for Junior and Senior level math classes. To this day, I don't understand the purpose of having students buy graphing calculators.
Graphing calculators have the problem of really dumbing things down. Learning how to use the calculator is a bit of a hurdle... but once you do, you can get by without learning the quadratic equation, how to convert from moles to grams, what the relation between physical and kinetic energy is, &ct. It's expected that most of this will come with the calculator, but that which doesn't is a simple exercise in typing to fix.
Also, there is a problem of monetary cost. $100 may not be a lot to most people, but it is for a few. It's money that could be much better spent too. Think about it... $100 per high school student, in a system where you have roughly one math teacher for every two hundred students?
So what do we get in exchange for this? There's two productive uses of a graphing calculator.
The first, institutional use, is that kids will understand Analytical Geometry and Trig better if they can SEE equations. It's easy to imagine how this might help a kid understand how to push around equations like F(x-x0) + y0. It's just not a very useful thing to learn. I know calculators are capable of so much more, graphing Crossed Troughs and whatnought, but that's too far beyong what you learn in high school to be meaningful.
The other benefit merits a bit of appreciation... the student recreational use. If you give a kid a ball and free time, he'll kick it. If you give a kid a programmable machine and free time, he'll program it. Even so, very few students actually do this. It's encouraging to see kids compare their text adventures with each other, but but 95% of the student body, this toy is pearls before swine.
Graphing calculators, not wholly without benefits, do not outweigh the problems they cause. Ironically, the place they deal the most damage is probably math, because we end up with kids getting by without understanding order of operations or basic algebraic manipulation. Give schools robotics teams, not calculators.
RPN is hard.
I still use my 48sx from the early 90s. And I have a 15C somewhere that still kicks butt.
HPs are tools, the TIs feel like toys.
These days, for simple stuff I use google as a calculator (and unit converter). http://www.googleguide.com/calculator.html
Memories... I actually learned to spell "print" so I could make my TI 99/4A print my name on the screen.. If only I had restrained my 5 year-old self from spitting upon my little brother, then our babysitter wouldn't have had a reason to yank the cartridge out with the power on... I'm still somewhat bitter about that.
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
I don't know if any consumer flash drives have enough space for all of the equations they want you to memorize..
http://www.johnmunsch.com/2001/08/calculator_rip_o ffs.html
http://www.epinions.com/content_62095134340
Some reporter out there please do a piece on the monopoly and marketing push by these calculator companies forcing students to buy expensive calculators. These things NEVER come down in price. Those arm processors are expensive?