Slashdot Mirror
Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by hobbyist calculator programmers, Casio has recently unveiled new graphing calculator models, the Casio fx-CG10/20 series, less than a year after Texas Instruments released the TI-Nspire Touchpad. The calculators features a 65536 colors screen (16-bit) with a resolution of 384x216 pixels, 16 MB of Flash memory (10 available for the user) and 140 hours of battery life. The calculators will retail starting at $129.99. Although Casio's new calculator official page have limited information about the calculator programming capabilities and processor speed, could this eventually mark the end of TI's reign in North American schools?"
http://xkcd.com/768/
I don't understand the need for such fancy calculators for students. I'm sure there are some professionals that might like to have it, but I used a TI-83 through all high school and college and never found something you couldn't make it do that you needed.
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
Casio already had a color calculator way back when I was in high school. The curriculum still revolved around the use of the TI-83, though, so people with anything else were pretty much on their own.
No wireless. Less space than a TI. Lame.
The fact that graphing calculators of quite modest specs and build still cost so much is a gooey blob of saliva in the face of idealist theories of competition.
However, the fact that graphing calculators are still of quite modest specs isn't.
The market for calculators is, basically, tests. They might also be used for homework and the occasional foray into programming; but they are basically purchased for tests. In a testing environment, wifi and 16GB of internal storage are not, shall we say, of much use in maintaining a fair testing environment.
Even if you make the "If the test is good, flashcards won't help you, and neither will notes stored on a calculator/iPod/whatever" argument(which is arguably a lot truer at higher levels), that still doesn't address the issue of network connected devices.
Imagine the following: iPod touch/iPhone with camera, internet connection, some sort of web conferencing software. Pay 29.95 at the paypal portal and, for the duration of the test if you get stuck on a problem, take a picture of it, and a suitably educated person in India solves it and sends back an image of the solution. Win/win(sort of). The cheater can get past even "mere facts won't save you" questions, and someone in a lower cost of living country makes comparatively good money solving easy problems in their area of expertise. The test, of course, becomes useless.
Intentionally limited devices for pedagogical purposes are eminently sensible. It's just that it should be pretty simple to stamp out a TI-83(or 89, the hardware doesn't exactly differ wildly) for absolute peanuts, not $100 a pop.
No... RPN has more advantages than you claim, and people who have become adept at it (not just learned it as a token thing, but really learned to think in that way) almost never want to go back.
(1) You can see intermediate results of your calculations as you go along.
(2) Fewer keystrokes are needed to perform computations, so there are fewer opportunities for mistakes.
(3) For highly proficient users, RPN allows for faster use of the calculator because of not having to enter and track lots of parens.
It's a similar situation to texting on a cell phone vs touch typing. If you are used to texting and never learned to touch type, you won't truly realize how much of a superior input system touch typing is.
But more and more our world is moving away from things that require any degree of learned skill, in favor of no or low-skill methods which yield inferior results.
I have an Algebra book but it irritates me because it's centered on the use of a graphing calculator. It teaches Algebra... but it IMMEDIATELY begins a discussion of graphic calculators, and not as an add-on device. I'm going to write an arithmetic book that teaches the use of a Soroban; but this will be teaching math, and then it will step out to "so here's how to do addition on a Japanese Abacus... and here's how it relates to pen-and-paper columnar addition... and think about this, it makes it simple in your head." I don't want to teach people that math == device; math is a method, device is a tool.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
One answer that maybe nobody else will come up with: Easy UI.
I just find it a lot faster and easier to punch up some calculations on a device that has a whole mess of purpose-built buttons on the front of it, rather than trying to do the same with a standard keyboard that was never intended for scientific calculation. You can write up programs and key them to buttons, too.
Disclaimer: I use an HP 50g. Your experience with a TI or Casio calculator may vary. RPN, baby.
Breakfast served all day!
Red-Green Color blind here.
Purple doesn't exist and is a conspiracy against the colorblind. My daughter loves to pick out my shirts and I have at least four "blue shirts" that girls tell are lovely shades of purple.
Brown is just a different shade of green.
You are right about anecdotes. However, in the absence of real data, anecdotes are all we have.
Let me put it this way: the people who bash RPN are mostly people who have not really used it. If a person actually takes the time to learn RPN and become proficient with it, they never seem to want to go back. I would LOVE to hear from somebody who is good at RPN, but still prefers algebraic entry.
Yes, in some cases, it might be easier to just enter the equation as it is listed. With the HP 48 G series (the latest that I have used), you CAN enter equations that way if you want to.
Generally, I can bang out an equation on RPN much faster than I can using a standard algebraic calculator. Also, hitting "enter" to duplicate an entry on the stack only takes one keystroke, where storing a number to a named memory location typically takes at least three key presses. And, you never have to bother to hit a parenthesis key. Yes, your own brain has to do a little more work, but some of us enjoy that.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
No, it doesn't.
Take this example:
(5 + 3) * (3 + 2)
When we think and calculate it in our head, we take 5 and 3, add them to get 8. Then we take 3 and 2, add them, and get 5. Finally, we multiply 8 by 5 to get 40.
And guess what? That's exactly how RPN does it. Including giving you the intermediate results of 8 and 5.
Infix means you can't do the multiplication because you don't know what to multiply with at that point.
(If trying to force the multiplication earlier by expanding, you get "5 + 3 = 8, 8 * 3 = 24, 8 * 2 = 16, add 24 and 16 to get 40", but that still requires doing a calculation on the right hand side of the operation before jumping back to it.)
The fancy calculator I had when I was a kid (late 80's) was the size of a phone in 2010. Today's calculators have nothing like the processing power of a phone that costs roughly the same, yet they are now the size of ancient mobile phones. I don't get it.
A lot of people who love editing with VI would disagree with you. Yes, it is a lot more trouble to learn this than to just use Notepad, but those who have learned it love it and would never go back.
Also, by your definition, the automatic transmission should easily beat a stick-shift. Guess what race cars use?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."