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TI Calculator DRM Defeated
josath writes "Texas Instruments' flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware."
You cannot bring a laptop into a standardized test, that's why TI cares. The only real business TI has with its graphing calculators is high school (and to some extent, middle school) students, and only because the teachers are under the illusion that the calculators cannot do everything that a laptop can do.
Palm trees and 8
http://www.xkcd.com/768/
The last time this came up on /., I said that it is probably about standardized tests. A number of people pointed out that when they were in school, calculators were reset to the factory defaults before they were allowed to use them on an exam. What I have to wonder about, though, is what it means to be reset to "factory defaults" -- I doubt that there is a second copy of the original firmware that will be forced to load when the reset button is pressed. More likely, "factory defaults" only means clearing anything the user created, but leaving the firmware intact.
Thus, if users can just install their own firmware, TI risks having the current illusion that teachers are under -- that the calculators are "less of a computer" than any other computer -- being undermined.
Palm trees and 8
Of course the simplest solution would still be for the school to have, say, 100 calculators owned by the school, exclusively to be used in tests. People don't bring their own calculator, they use the school-supplied one. It would be a one-time investment (calculators tend to work for very extended times).
Another solution would be to only allow calculators without permanent storage. Who needs graphing calculators anyway?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
the answers to common and uncommon questions are a quick search away
If you are asking the same question year after year, then sure, that is a problem. The solution is as clear as day: ask different questions on each exam. If a student looks up the answers to previous exams on Google, and from that is able to answer new questions...then what is the problem, exactly? The student learned how to solve the problems they are expected to be able to solve, which seems like a victory for education.
As for calculators, they should not be allowed on exams at all, or in classrooms. Math is not about pushing buttons, and if every math problem (even in physics and chemistry) a student encountered required them to find a solution without the assistance of a calculator, we would not have to water down math exams just to ensure that more than 50% of the students pass (maybe I am being a bit optimistic about the extra practice...).
Palm trees and 8
As it turns out, and this was mentioned the last time there was a TI article on /., a common strategy schools use is to press the reset button on the calculator, which clears out BASIC programs and whatnot. It seems, however, that the reset button does not touch the firmware -- which is why TI is probably worried about this situation.
I am vehemently opposed to DRM, but I would not go as far as to claim that the companies pushing DRM want to control their users just for the sake of control. These people are not twirling their mustachios and laughing to each other about their evil plots -- they have a reason for wanting to control their users, and it almost always boils down to making money. TI is worried about losing the only remaining market for graphing calculators, so they will go to any length, including undermining user freedoms, to try to maintain that market.
Palm trees and 8
The teacher's only solution would be to purchase additional TI calculators
Or they might wake up and realize that graphing calculators do not solve any educational goals. Then TI would be screwed, as teachers began requiring their students to actually understand math instead of just understanding how to push buttons.
Palm trees and 8
As for calculators, they should not be allowed on exams at all, or in classrooms. Math is not about pushing buttons, and if every math problem (even in physics and chemistry) a student encountered required them to find a solution without the assistance of a calculator, we would not have to water down math exams just to ensure that more than 50% of the students pass (maybe I am being a bit optimistic about the extra practice...).
You are obviously to young to know that engineers have always used calculators. Before these new fangled electronic things people used slide rules, they could do almosy as much as a modern calculator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule
I dont read
If "getting caught up in the algebra" is a problem, then you need all the practice you can get. There is nothing wrong with being required to work out the algebra in a math course, and in high school physics and chemistry courses, it is rare for the algebra to go beyond basic quadratic equations or systems of linear equations, neither of which takes a terribly long time to work out.
Palm trees and 8
The important parts of math are abstract, not computational. It's a good thing to get rid of the tedious computation that you mastered back in 3rd grade. Removing calculators would be an artificial barrier to learning, like making students scan through paper volumes of trig tables.
Except that students are unable to do basic arithmetic these days. It is fine for an engineering undergrad to use a calculator to save some time, but when people are graduating high school and cannot multiply two numbers, there is a very serious problem. Yes, math is abstract, but the ability to compute a result still matters -- when I was a teenager working in an ice cream store, people would sometimes give me some change after I had entered everything into the cash register, and so I was forced to quickly do some arithmetic...and many of the kids working with me could not even handle that. Now I am in grad school, and I still find myself having to do basic arithmetic -- the research I am doing is almost entirely abstract math (cryptography), but when I am standing next to a whiteboard trying to explain something, I sometimes have a need to do some multiplication.
Considering that a high school in the neighborhood where I grew up had the dubious honor of less than 40% of its students being able to pass a basic one-variable algebra exam, there is no excuse for giving the students less practice working out problems without calculators. It would be better if they were able to at least understand the most basic math and not run to a calculator than if they were unable to do any math and need a calculator just to subtract some numbers.
Palm trees and 8
Actually, a friend of mine came up with a genius idea: write a TI-83 emulator on his TI-83.
What he did was make it look like his calculator was not running any program (just showing the main screen) when in fact it is running a program: his emulator. The teacher could test out with a simple math calculation while under the emulator and it would work just fine. However, when the teacher tries to delete any of the programs he had or try to reset all the data, it would do so only for the emulator, not for the real TI-83 data.
So, right before giving his calculator to the teacher before the exam, he would run his emulator. The teacher would clear the memory of the emulator, but then he would then exit out of the emulator and have all of his real programs intact.
Pushing reset results in visible screen changes. You can both have firmware fake a reset in that case or have the cheating system embedded into the firmware.
If the calculator won't reset, then they're either going to do a closer check for cheat stuff or just not let you have the calculator(hope you brought a backup!).
I don't read AC A human right