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Are Graphical Calculators Pointless?

Posted by Soulskill on from the is-it-pointless-to-play-drug-wars-while-looking-productive dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments and Casio have recently released new flagship graphical calculators but what, exactly, is the point of using them? They are slow, with limited memory and a 'high-resolution' display that is no such thing. For $100 more than the NSpire CX CAS you could buy a netbook and fill it with cutting edge mathematical software such as Octave, Scilab, SAGE and so on. You could also use it for web browsing, email and a thousand other things. One argument heard for using these calculators is: 'They are limited enough to use in exams.' Sounds sensible, but it raises the question: 'Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?'"

12 of 636 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious by Anrego · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?

    Cause the large portion of students are untrustable cheating bastards? Ok, a little bit of hyperbole, but that really is the reason. In addition to web browsing, you could also load equation solvers and all manner of tools to enable one to cheat their way through math. The old way overpriced graphing calculators can be wiped before a test, and offer the right mixture of functionality and cripple that schools want.

    The price I think is just a function of having a captive consumer base. They charge as much for something that should cost so very little because the people who need it are going to buy it.

    And yes, I'm sure the ol` "in real life I'd google the answer anyway" point is going to come up, and while I agree for most traditional memorize and regurgitate type courses, I still think math should be tough with a reasonable distance from crutches, while at the same time not trying to pretend they don't exist either. Show them matlab, but make `em work it out on paper on the test.

    1. Re:Obvious by gman003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The thing is, even the "standard" graphing calculators are now advanced enough to teach with. Smart teachers are now demanding students reformat their calculators before a test, because otherwise they (like me) would just write a BASIC program instead of memorizing a formula, or store notes as an image.

      Of course, I wrote a BASIC program that mimicked the shell, except a) it did not actually reformat, just display a message that it did so, and b) like a rootkit, it displayed false values for stored data, in this case blanks. It wasn't flawless (the ON key would interrupt the program), but none of my teachers figured it out. Arguably, it was more work than memorizing the formulas in the first place. Also arguably, this was more useful to me than rote-learning the proof of the quadratic formula.

    2. Re:Obvious by MoonBuggy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Thing is, if they're being bought primarily for the lack of features, it seems hardly worth bothering with an expensive graphing calculator in the first place. If you don't want people using equation solvers, storage capabilities, and so forth then they're pretty much a total waste of money (and if you need to do these things in real life, that money is better spent on a copy of Mathematica). I bought one in school, just like everyone else on the course, and I don't think I ever actually used any features you wouldn't find on a $10 scientific calculator.

      If I need to plot a graph, or get the roots of a difficult equation, or whatever else, I'll do it on the computer. If I'm in an exam designed to test my ability to do those things, it'll probably be written in such a way that the calculator can't just do it for me. The overlap between things that can be tested in an exam, and things that a graphical calculator can do but a scientific calculator can't, is minuscule, and really doesn't seem worth making everyone buy the things just to test that tiny area.

    3. Re:Obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      why do you need to memorize the proof for the quadratic formula? If you know it, it's no work to prove it.

    4. Re:Obvious by sweatyboatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Cause the large portion of students are untrustable cheating bastards?

      "Cheating" is a concept that only makes sense in the context of "testing". In the real world, cheating would be called "collaboration".

      We have a system of education designed around preparing people for solitary, boring, mindless work.

      If you're good at working by yourself on predictable problems you will do really good at high school (and pretty well at college) in the US. If you thrive when interacting with other people and coordinating amongst a variety of skills to solve difficult problems, that ability will rarely be academically useful until you get out of the education system and into the real world.

      Hopefully by that point you haven't allowed the deficiencies of public education to undermine your confidence and convince you that there's something wrong with you.

      --
      It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
    5. Re:Obvious by gman003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I wrote what was practically an entire operating system in a VERY limited version of BASIC. That took (if I do say so myself) a remarkable amount of programming skill. Some of the things I first did there (subroutines, nested loops, text parsing) are now things I use daily (GOTO, thankfully, not being one of them).

      Meanwhile, I have not used the quadratic formula since I finished Calculus, let alone had to recite a proof of it. I have little doubt that knowing what the formula is and how to use it is relatively important. However, I would like to see a plausible theoretical situation in which one would need to recite a proof of the quadratic formula, without the use of any references.

    6. Re:Obvious by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In fact, if you work for any sort of business with more than 5 employees, you've been doing exactly that!

      Except you apparently failed to note that the workers who call for "collaboration" have positions and titles like: managers, bosses, CEOs etc. It is exceptional indeed if any of them is capable of doing even a fraction of actual work his or her underlings do since they've, quite successfully may I add, invested all their time into skills to induce "collaboration" with others in which they reap nearly all the benefits.

      And, surprisingly, a vast majority of those with "valuable skill sets" waste no time in their rush to "collaborate" with the said individuals, likely including you. It is only your fellow competitors for the favors of these masters of yours, or people whom you intend to "collaborate" into your own personal gain, that you reserve all your disdain for: those better know what they are all about, lest no profit!

      As it is, in the "real world", "cheating" is one of the most valuable skills in our duplicity-based society: that is how the social elites are made. Those who learned early on to "play by the rules" are doomed to be forever serfs and to "collaborate" for those who did not.

  2. TI by Lehk228 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but it raises the question: 'Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?'"

    because Texas Instruments has lobbied very successfully to keep it that way.

    technology that has barely advanced since the early 90's and probably only costs $10 or so to make being sold for $100-$150 to every student

    to protect that kind of profit I would bribe a bunch of school districts too!

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  3. Re:Another viewpoint on calculators and exams... by pclminion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's the point in "teaching" math if you let the calculator do 90% of the work?

    What's the point in "teaching" math if you let the decimal system and all that clever carry-the-one shit do all the work? I mean seriously, students need to learn what addition really is -- make them put 198 beans into a pot, then put another 61 beans in the pot, then count the beans to get the answer.

    Being a human is about being smart, not being dumb. Forcing a student to do addition on paper when the student is studying partial differential equations is nothing but an insult. By that point I think they've earned the right to not continually have to prove that they can add two numbers together.

    As an undergrad taking physics I had this bad habit of forgetting my calculator, especially on test day. I'd end up doing longhand division and taking up half the paper and leaving less room to write the actual answer. The professor started asking me what the hell I was smoking.

  4. Re:Really, I thought the question is... by adamdoyle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree that you shouldn't "need" a calculator, but on a test in a non-math class, it's nice to have. For instance, in Physics, maybe you have a bunch of problems involving kinematic equations and you barely have enough time to set them up. It's nice to be able to use the calculator to reduce your augmented matrix into RREF. Sure, I can do it by hand, but I don't always have time on a test. With a TI-89, I can save a bunch of time by taking the grunt work out of the equation. And a laptop wouldn't work because what kind of teacher is going to let students have internet access during a test? (not to mention access to scanned copies of their notes, etc.)

  5. Re:Really, I thought the question is... by limaxray · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have to disagree with this. When you go on to actually use the math you've learned, not using a calculator is plain silly. There is no way I could have completed a few EE exams without my TI89 because of the large amount of complex (in both uses of the term) math required. I remember a number of my friends had trouble simply because they didn't know how to use their calculators and had to do their calcs by hand. I'm sorry, but when you have a test with a dozen problems, each requiring as much number crunching as an average calc exam, you need the calculator.

    And now that I'm all grown up, I'm not going to model a filter by hand on a piece of graph paper. I'm going to use Matlab. If an engineer wanted to do math by hand today, they'd be seen as a dinosaur wasting time - not some mathematical genius.

    If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.

  6. Best math class I ever had was open book by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In fact it was open book, open note, open teacher. You could go ask the teacher for help. He wouldn't give you the answer, but he'd help steer you on the right course. I learned more in that class than in any other. Now of course people are quick to say "No you didn't, you just liked it because it was easy." Actually it was not easy, but my appreciation for how much I'd learned came not from that class, but after.

    So first thing to understand is that I'm good at math, but not stellar. I was never the stereotypical "Better than everyone at math and loving it," geek. I did well, got to advanced (but not advanced placement) math classes, usually got Bs and As and so on, but I was no super math whiz, and while I didn't hate it, I didn't really like it that much.

    It was a precalc class, taken my senior year of high school. So in university I started in Calc 1 as you'd expect. At the beginning of the second class, the teacher gave us a precalc test. It was to be fully graded, though not counted. He said he was doing this first to get a feeling for how much precalc he needed to cover since it often got taught wrong, and also to help people who might not be ready for Calc 1. If you bombed the test he didn't kick you out, but suggested that you might wish to transfer to precalc since it was unlikely you'd do well.

    I just aced that test, near 100%, by far the highest score in the class. He came up and asked me where Id' learned precalc, since it was so rare to find someone with such a solid knowledge of it.

    Never before or since had I learned so much in a math class, and he allowed calculators, the book, any notes, and asking him questions. The tests were about learning how to do the math, how it worked, not about making sure you could do the fiddly stuff in your head.