Are Graphical Calculators Pointless?

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?'"

Comments

Obvious

[Anrego]

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.

Re:Obvious

[gman003]

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.

Re:Obvious

[Sonny Yatsen]

Personally, I think as far as math education should go, the more crippled, the better. The most advanced calculators make kids dependent on them when learning. Let's let them use calculators that can only give them the most basic info like a replacement for Trig tables or for basic calculation. Anything more and the kids will learn more about the calculator and less about the subject.

Re:Obvious

[MoonBuggy]

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.

Re:Obvious

[MusedFable]

I think modern technology should be integrated with learning. I don't think of it as a crutch just like an abacus isn't or a calculator isn't. It's a tool that previous generations invented for the betterment of society and we should use them.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always had the philosophy that you should take it one further and skip calculators altogether in math class. For harder K-12 math, there's no real calculations involved, just express your answer without evaluating the actual value of the square root of 5 or pi or sin(3), etc. Students shouldn't need any help doing basic arithmetic. Which is why they shouldn't need calculators for easier math either (if they need them, they deserve to fail). For classes in physics or chemistry, basic calculators should be acceptable since in those classes you're generally more concerned with the numerical answer.

Re:Obvious

[piripiri]

Not everyone can afford a hi-tech gadget, not here nor anywhere in the world.

Re:Obvious

[sweatyboatman]

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.

Re:Obvious

[arth1]

Quite often engineers have to create formulae.
And if all you can do is use a calculator to solve them, you're then helpless, and won't be more than a technician or programmer.

Yes, tools are good, but you should show that you understand what they do before you get to use them. Else, the only one you're cheating is yourself.

Re:Obvious

[telekon]

Honestly, the real reason for the demand for crippled technology is the idiocy and cluelessness of high school maths teachers. What's the problem with writing a TI-BASIC program to solve a formula?

When I was in high school (the mid-late 90's), the first thing I did when I understood a formula was to write a program on my calculator to solve it. (I did the same thing on my Debian box at home, but in C, just to make sure I wasn't being retardedized by BASIC). This was before the days of 'wipe your calculator before the test', so of course, I would use my program; I was here to learn math, not to repeatedly perform rote computation, right?

Wrong, evidently. I lost points on my exams for 'not showing my work', even though I included my code (which my teachers couldn't understand, apparently). Luckily, my mother got it. She went to every parent-teacher conference to defend my use of programming rather than repetitive, boring computation. The teachers argued, 'Well, if he just wrote a program, how do I know he understood the math.' She just looked at them. 'Really? How could he write a program without understanding the math?'

Eventually, it came down to, 'He has to show his work, that's the stupid rule because I'm a big stupid-head.' Luckily, I discovered this trick before the xkcd comic made it blatant.

In hindsight, it's not so bad. Today I'm a programmer, and I make more than twice what my idiot math teachers made, and probably have more fun doing it.

In other news, Conrad Wolfram agrees with me 100%. And I trust Stephen Wolfram's son over my high school math teachers any day of the week.

Re:Obvious

[PopeRatzo]

Also arguably, this was more useful to me than rote-learning the proof of the quadratic formula.

I would like to hear that argument.

I've had a student argue that the skills involved in plagiarizing a paper about Nabokov's Pale Fire were more valuable than reading the great novel and doing the thinking and writing involved in producing an original paper. I wonder why some 20 years old would think he had the merest grasp of what would or would not be "useful" to him.''

After all, learning to braze or cadweld a pipe could be much more useful than learning to solve a partial differential equation, if you wanted to be a plumber.

Looking back on my own education, the one quality I wish I'd had more of is humility.

Re:Obvious

[twidarkling]

Then maybe math should become less about solving formulae and more about identifying variables and constructing formulae to obtain the needed information. It's not a bad idea by any stretch, though how workable it is could be debated.

Re:Obvious

[telekon]

Real men use K&E. Now get off my lawn.

Real men use K&R. Write in C once, perform n times. Done.

Re:Obvious

[Gutboy]

Isn't that just word problems? I've always enjoyed them, but I knew most of my classmates dreaded them.

Re:Obvious

[MaskedSlacker]

Because writing a fairly complicated program with the described functionality requires all of the skills, and more, involved in the proof of the quadratic formula (which is an especially trivial proof if you already know the formula). It's objectively more useful to learn, because it requires the same skills and other skills as well, not just differently useful (requiring different skills of unrelated application).

Re:Obvious

[c0d3g33k]

You're clearly expecting the best of people (that's ok - I do too, and I'm happily justified in doing so much of the time. However ...). In the *real* real world, this "collaboration" you refer to often boils down to this: the folks that cheated their way through their educations ride on the backs of those who didn't. The former can't actually do the work their jobs require (or at least not at an expert level), so they rely on the latter to carry the load. A team context makes it easier for such people because they can share in the achievements of the team though individual contributions were highly unbalanced. This sucks, particularly if you're the one who gets to be the pack mule. I, for one, welcome our new calculator banning overlords.

Re:Obvious

[samweber]

In the real world, cheating would be called "collaboration".

Why, yes indeed. I worked in industry for many years, and I can tell you that no workers were more highly valued than those who were unable to do even the simplest things by themselves. "Let's collaborate!" they would say, and our hearts warmed instantly and we leapt into action, "helping" our valued coworkers, doing their work for them. In contrast, those with highly valuable skillsets, able to quickly solve difficult problems, those were as dirt to us. "Be off with you!" we'd cry, "and never dare to cross our path again!" Yes, as sweatyboatman says, nothing is more valuable in the real world than incompetence!

Re:Obvious

[Obfuscant]

Knowing WHAT formula to use is key.

Partial credit for an incomplete answer.

Knowing what formula, what it means, what assumptions it requires, and what limitations it has, is key. That means memorizing its details.

Simply programming the solution into your calculator doesn't teach you anything but what the formula is. It doesn't demonstrate any knowledge of when/why/how to use the formula.

It's the same level of knowledge that has a student saying the answer to a problem is "1" when he uses an RPN calculator. He had the formula written down in front of him, but wasn't smart enough to realize the vastly wrong answer when he thought he was using it correctly. (He pressed an additional ENTER and wound up dividing one number by itself.) This problem dealt with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a buffer solution, and it should have been obvious that '1' was a completely ridiculous answer. (The real answer was around 10e-6.)

Except you get out in the real world and the last thing you want is your engineer pulling formulae from their (faulty) memory when they are already available in the computers they will be using.

No, the last thing you want is your engineer picking an equation to use because it looks like it might apply and it has been programmed into the computer for him. The correct problem solving method means knowing the problem to be solved first and then solving it, not picking from a list of problems that have already been solved and reproducing it.

Calling these calculators "crippled" is wrong. They are limited in function, deliberately. (car analogy) It is like calling a VW bug "crippled" because it isn't doing the job of a 1/4 ton pickup truck. (/car analogy).

They are smaller, cheaper and lighter than a computer (even a netbook, and much cheaper than an iPad). They are harder to use to cheat, and unfortunately, that is an issue that makes them better for classwork than those full computers with fancy software. They are just the right level to remove the tedium of doing basic math (which should have been mastered by now) while leaving the requirement to think through the problem to know what basic math needs to be applied.

Re:Obvious

[iluvcapra]

I've had a student argue that the skills involved in plagiarizing a paper about Nabokov's Pale Fire were more valuable than reading the great novel and doing the thinking and writing involved in producing an original paper.

Wow, it would have been at least marginally clever if he'd claimed Zemblan diplomatic immunity...

One might point your student to Laughter in the Dark: you know, the Nabokov novel about the dilettante who's self-satisfaction and self-deception are his undoing.

Re:Obvious

[wierd_w]

It has been my experience that most word problems in school settings are HIGHLY contrived, and are basically just restating the desired formula in sentence form.

More useful for the engineering student would be to pose a problem, rather than to ask a question. EG:

Create a formula for a 3D lofted surface that produces the maximum lift with the least drag for an object 10 meters long and 5 meters wide. Due to material fragility, max strain cannot exceed 30ka/cm^2, and wind sheer restricts max airspeed to 120kph.

The assigned task is to create the formula that rules the resulting wing surface, to maintain the requirements provided. This question would be open book and would permit the student to look up burnouli's formula, or anything else they feel they need to help calculate lift force, without detracting from the purpose of the excercise and would be more appropriate for what an aspiring engineer would be faced with in the course of his/her career. It would test how well they understand the theory behind the mathematics in the class quite effectively, and would not require some arbitrarily imposed handicap like a crippled graphing calculator.

Sadly, Most teachers are too impatient and or lazy to create such an open ended question-- as it would require the teacher to evaluate a large number of possible submissions for fitness.

The reason why word problems are usually just syntax-exact translations from cookie-cutter formulas, is because it makes for only a single possible solution, that is easily pass/failed by the teacher.

Math is not about cookie cutter answers, it is about FINDING answers, and DESCRIBING problems. I dont know about anyone else here, but I was strongly put off by formal math instruction because of this over-dependence on easy evaluation metrics on the teacher's side of the table. The questions do not require thought, only compliance-- which does not teach the fundemental skill behind mathematics-- Understanding the problem posed to you with sufficient abstraction to create a simple model that describes the problem in its entirety.

I learned more about mathematics when I was cutting teeth on programming than I did in school; It was one thing to find out how many apples steve gave bob-- it was another altogether to find clever solutions to the problem of determining if a number is prime or not in a fast and efficient manner, where the input number is any "n", and that still far removed from identifying when a prime number is either going to make or break something you are working on.

I take this dependence upon requiring broken calculators in math classes, especially advanced math classes, to be highly telling of the kind of education we are trying to give and consider it a sympthom of why our educational system is failing miserably, especially in math and science.

We don't teach people the skills of being a scientist-- we teach them what has already been discovered (sometimes not even that..). We dont teach them how to be a mathematician, we teach them already found formulae, then play trivial pursuit.

Re:Obvious

[metamatic]

Personally, I think as far as math education should go, the more crippled, the better.

Well, that's why they're using TI calculators rather than RPN...

Re:Obvious

[gman003]

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.

Re:Obvious

[rolfwind]

I and many of my professors were of the opinion that memorizing functions and random facts was useless (Hey, didn't Watson just show us this?). What's the point? Won't you have a book in real life? Why not?

I'm of the opinion that math/physics/chemistry tests should be open book. Education should teach you to be able to think and solve problems, not be a walking encyclopedia. That way you can make TOUGHER questions where the student has to recognize the elements of the problems and put it all together to solve it without them being able to complain about the mean professor making them memorize esoteric lists. Put in extraneous information that's just there to distract the people who don't know what they're doing.

Then make the limiting factor is simply TIME. Like a real job. Let the person who needs to google everything dither about, flailing his arms as they only solved 30% of the test question. Trust me, if you weren't paying attention in class in most of these course, the google won't help you unless the question are unerringly simple and straightforward.

Then simply randomize the order of the questions, make extra questions so each class (or class) draws different ones, and allow randomized values for the variables so kids from one class can't just email kids of another and get answers to an identical or near identical test.

BTW, the graphical calculator racket is little different than the textbook racket.

Re:Obvious

[johnsnails]

As a mathematics teacher I always encouraged my students to show working as a means of giving them partial marks for partially correct answers. Very hard to award marks for working out that is not there even if I can see what they *probably* did wrong to get the mark they did.

Re:Obvious

[pclminion]

Today I'm a programmer, and I make more than twice what my idiot math teachers made, and probably have more fun doing it.

As a programmer, you must have experience with the following phenomenon: you come back to a piece of code you yourself wrote, a year or so later, and not only can you not remember how it works, you don't even remember that you're the one who wrote it. It's great and everything that you could turn the formulas into a computer program, but as a fellow programmer myself, I can tell you that I can turn all kinds of formulas into programs even if I don't understand the damn formulas.

The goal, which you apparently missed completely, was to learn math, not how to turn a formula into a computer program. There's simply no way around the fact that most of this stuff can only be mentally internalized by rote and repetition. It sucks, it's boring, it's also how learning happens. What you did, and your following smart-ass attempts to defend your case, had a quite foreseeable outcome. Although I commend your mother for going to bat for you. Seems like parents don't have the guts for that in most cases lately.

Re:Obvious

[introcept]

Speaking as an (ex) math teacher with degrees in electronic engineering and computer science, I can tell you there are very good, educational, reasons to "show your work" and demonstrate that you can do more than -use- a program.

Any decent, modern teaching course spends alot of time studying assessment methods and all the various ways that students can jump through the hoops, get the correct answers and still not have a clue what they're doing. That xkcd comic is a perfect example of how to get a correct answer without understanding mathematics, which is really what I'm interested in as a teacher.

Sure, writing a program that implements a particular mathematical technique demonstrates that you understand it (and probably at a much higher level). In practice, you end up with a much larger number of students that can download and use programs without understanding a single line of code. They can type in the numbers and get the correct answer(some programs will even spit out a few lines of working out). This assesses nothing and the students learn nothing, simply getting the answer isn't enough to learn or assess mathematics.

You also end up with students that do know how to program but don't understand that it isn't appropriate to use a numerical solvers when studying analytical methods. Sure, they can get the answer and understand their process, but they really haven't shown that they understand the underlying trogonometric functions or calculus methods that are the focus of the course.

There's definitely a large number of teachers that don't understand new technology and are resistant to any sort of modernisation of the system (one of the reasons I ditched teaching for engineering), but to say that use of technologies with artifical restrictions is due solely to the 'idiocy' and 'cluelessness' of your 'big stupid-head' teachers shows a real lack of understanding of the purpose of mathematics courses and the practicalities of school-based education.

Re:Obvious

[dbIII]

If you don't need to do anything then you don't need to know anything.
If they are going to grow up to just follow standard operating procedures devised by somebody else then go home and watch TV they may never need that stuff. If they are going to do a bit more or have hobbies that involve working with physical objects then they might need that stuff.
I was lucky and grew up reading Martin Garner's Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions column in Scientific American which helped make it interesting and connect it to reality.

Re:Obvious

[xtal]

I completed a BSc. Electrical Engineering degree - 8, I think mathematics courses - without using a single calculator in an exam. The mathematics department, quite rightly, forbade their use. They have no part in a mathematics exam, as does any exam that requires you to use a calculator. Why not just substiute x and use values that cancel out, or work out nicely? It has the benefit of helping you know you've done something gravely stupid.

Calculators, and use of symbolic integration and other packages were of course heavily encouraged to - get this - HELP YOU LEARN THE CONCEPTS so you can do well on the exams.

My other engineering courses didn't care too much what you used, so long as you weren't connecting externally. This is a problem with using a netbook, but the same principle applies. Make the exams sane so you don't need to use a calculator at all!

I graduated in 2000 - 11 years now - so these concepts should not be revolutionary.

Fire the lazy, no good teachers who can't write a decent exam. My stats course was famously open-book, with a cheat sheet. None of which would help you worth a damn on the exam if you didn't do the work.

Lazy students? Lazy no good profs.

Re:Obvious

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. For proof of this, just look at who runs our society: politicians. They're all a bunch of liars and cheats. Do they ever get in trouble for it? No. Usually, they retire in luxury, and at the very worst, they get caught in a scandal and are forced to resign, but you never see those guys on a street corner begging for food.

Re:Obvious

[edremy]

I honestly don't understand the attraction for totally closed book exams.

Back when I was teaching Chem101, I let my students bring in a 3x5 card with any formulas or notes they wanted. The final got an 8x11 sheet of paper. This solves a couple of issues- it massively reduces cheating since you're allowed (some) notes, and it forces the student to figure out what's on the card, since space is limited. Anyone who spends the time figuring that out has just done a whole pile of studying without realizing it.

And I banned calculators on PChem tests. Just write out your work, with units- I don't give a damn about the final numerical answer. (I did offer extra credit for anyone willing to use a slide rule, but could never get a taker. I even offered to provide the slide rule...)

Re:Obvious

[IgnoramusMaximus]

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.

Re:Obvious

[iluvcapra]

Probably because when you're 20 years old you know what you want to do in life

If this was the case, then this student was a fool. This is the twenty-first century, where everyone has three careers and most people have a midlife crisis where they reevaluate their objectives and realize they wish they'd paid more attention in their liberal arts classes.

Re:Obvious

[iluvcapra]

If I ask you to write a paper on a specific book, but you decide to turn in a creative essay because "it is more valuable of an exercise", I'm going to grade you on how well you accomplished writing a paper for that book. If you really care about "the learning value of the assignment", then I can laugh when you whine about the grade

This is the sort of typical lazy anti-intellectualism that Americans seem to cherish. Only in America can you decide you don't need the lessons in a book without going to the trouble of actually reading it. At least our forebearers read their interlocutors and rejected them on the merits, instead of glibly claiming that the reading was a waste of time.

Your defintion of intelligent students "challenging" their education is simply the recipe of a dilletente, an intellectual phony. The only skill these people posses is how to rationalize their agreement with whoever is signing their paycheck. Claiming you don't need to read a book in order to refute it's usefulness is the death of Reason.

Re:Obvious

[reason]

I learnt a salutory lesson in high school back in the 1980s. Our maths teacher had given us dozens of simple functions and told us to graph them in polar coordinates. the first couple took me ages, calculating and plotting each point by hand. I felt comfortable that I knew how polar coordinates worked and felt I had no need to do each example in the problem set. So I wrote a simple BASIC program to do all the rest for me. I didn't bother to hide the fact, and handed in the results on dot matrix paper. My teacher queried it, and I explained that being able to write a programme to plot functions in polar coordinates proved that I understood the work. So he asked me what patterns I'd noticed. Off the top of my head, what would such-and-such a function look like? It was only then that I realised that in writing my programme, I hadn't just saved myself a lot of rote work, I'd skipped a lesson designed to force me to puzzle out the patterns. (Fortunately, it was a fairly simple set of patterns and it only took a moment's thought before I could answer the question, but if he hadn't asked, I might never have noticed and might have been reduced to plotting these things out one point at a time when exam time came).

Re:Obvious

[thegarbz]

With THIS you have grasped what many people just fail to see. Intuition should become part of every learning in life. I have a friend who has gotten nothing but high distinctions throughout her entire engineering degree. She is a mathematical genius. You drop a circuit in front of her she can solve all the steady state values in a minute, she can also quickly give you any gain or AC analysis.

But she can't grasp what a circuit does. If you put a drawing of an amplifier with some reactive components in the feedback loop in front of her she can't simply come out and say low pass or high pass. Put a powersupply circuit and she won't within a second answer if it's a buck or boost, if the capacitor is used to smooth output ripple, etc.

People miss this fundamental learning in all degrees. So you know how to write a quick sort, good for you, so do I with 2seconds of googling. But do you know when to use the quicksort on a dataset instantly and intuitively without googling for "What is the best sorting algorithm?"

Details can always be worked out or looked up. Conceptual vision and intuition however are the lifeblood of most professions, and people often miss this part about rote learning.

Re:Obvious

[argStyopa]

A corollary in support of your point: the ability to manually work through the basics of math are essential if only because the reliance on more and more complex systems REQUIRES that the humans doing so have some 'common sense' ability to interpret the results, and double check them in a basic sense.

True story: I bought something for a few bucks. I handed the teller a $10. She punches it into the register, and hands be $14 back in change. Patently impossible. So I said "I'm not sure this is my right change, I gave you a ten" - and she says yes, I gave her a ten but this is what the register says I should get as change. (Clearly, she'd put in $20, not $10.)

If you write complex formulas in code or excel, etc. - you HAVE to be able to hypothesize about the result, if only to make sure that the result is within the realm of possibility, to ensure that you didn't misplace a parenthesis or decimal somewhere.

Re:Obvious

[SpasticWeasel]

After yesterday, the only way I can write a sort routine requires lots and lots of folk dancing

TI

[Lehk228]

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!

Re:TI

[icebike]

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

Precisely WHO would TI lobby?

Re:TI

[Lehk228]

NYS board of regents, other state's counterparts, AP college board, US Dept. of Education, Education Testing Services (company administering the SAT's)

Re:TI

[dcw3]

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

Precisely WHO would TI lobby?

Not sure, but I was required to purchase a specific TI calculator for my kid just about four years ago, for a public high school trig class. If you didn't, you could fill out the forms with giving evidence as to why you couldn't afford it, or your child could take a less rigorous class. Great system, I wonder who gets paid off.

Size; runtime, harder to cheat

[Anonymous Coward]

They're small enough to be pocket portable ( smart phones could handle that , but awkward to type on to me
My ti-83 lasts forever on a battery set of easily replaced AA's
while it's not impossible to cheat; it is a lot harder to slip in hidden notes in a calculator.

Really, I thought the question is...

[Umuri]

Why are we having exams that require a calculator?
I did all of calculus and most of linear so far(sufficiently complex equations were done to allow for matlab use, but the test stuff could be done without), and even statistics(yay longhand division!) without one just fine, and most problems can easily be done without them if the proper setup numbers are used.

Also, they are NOT crippled enough. Even when i was in middle school there were program packs to download your textbook onto your ti-83 (I had a ti-80 and i could still type the formulas by hand) so they are still too advanced to not cheat with. And don't tell me you can just wipe the memory, any sufficiently smart cheater would have a ti with a different spare battery. You can find easy DIY's for those online nowadays easy.

Allow a calculator with a 10 key, if they need to graph something, then they should be able to figure it out enough by hand and not need a calculator.

All testing with a graphing calculator does is let more students pass because they don't need to learn, they just need to throw thier notes on the calculator memory. (Yes you'd have references in real life, but the point of most math tests is it's so basic you shouldn't NEED references, it should be the core material you know by heart)

Re:Really, I thought the question is...

[Anrego]

I think schools need to go heavy into _both_ approaches.

There is a lot of cool software for doing math, some of which enables you to do stuff wildly out of scope of pencil and paper... it should be taught rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.

But you also need the "you and your brain" stuff... that is, nothing but pencil and paper.

I don't see why schools try to find a middle ground... they should do both in a relatively separate manner.

Re:Really, I thought the question is...

[adamdoyle]

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.)

Re:Really, I thought the question is...

[limaxray]

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.

Re:Really, I thought the question is...

[hedwards]

If you can do the math without the calculator you can almost certainly do the math with the calculator. However you cannot say the same about the situation where you learn and practice using a calculator. A common stumbling block for students is when you take nearly all the numbers out and ask them to solve it. A lot of students can't identify if they've got the correct answer without checking against the calculator.

Re:Really, I thought the question is...

[s-whs]

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.

You are giving the same bogus "it saves time" argument as above, but then you give an even worse one. No, mathematics shouldn't teaching pure thinking, it should prepare you for the real world.

Maths prepares you for the real world by giving you basic skills you can use everywhere. But you will have to apply them yourself. Making mathematics classes a trade school class as you are suggesting is a travesty. This is similar to crap courses at university where you learn to use some fashionable programming language...

If you're any good at all, you get your graphing calculator out with manual, and learn how to do it within a short time. Ditto for learning a a new programming language...

Money?

[MrQuacker]

Because the schools get kickbacks from the book publishers. And the book publishers only publish math books that can be used with specific graphing calculators. Guess who pays off the publishers to do that?

To further the greed, even if they aren't getting kickbacks to increase sales of one line of calculators, they have no incentive to keep up with the tech and rewrite the books.Once they write one book, all they have to do to newer editions is charge the order that the problems are printed in. So its the same book, but different enough to force people to buy the new edition.

Oh please, this comes up every six months

[PCM2]

This same topic seems to get re-submitted to Slashdot about twice a year.

Short answer: If you need 100MB for a calculator, I salute you. If 320*240 pixels with 65,536 colours is too small and low-res for you for a calculator, you should save your money for a trip to the eye doctor.

Can a netbook do more different things than a calculator can? Yes, yes it can. That is why a calculator is not called something else... like, say, a netcalcubooklator.

My cell phone lets me make phone calls and also play Angry Birds. Why is Uniden still selling phones that don't have built-in synchronization to Google Contacts?

My 24" widescreen LCD monitor can display six pages of a book at once at full resolution. How do Amazon and Barnes & Noble get away with selling devices that can only display one page at a time, are not backlit, and can't run Photoshop?

The answer is obvious: There is plenty of room in the world for purpose-built devices. The reasons why people like to use those devices will vary. I, for one, like having a compact calculator that is programmable and has plenty of easy-to-stab dedicated calculator buttons on the front (as opposed to messing around with LaTek formula input, or whatever other input method you'd use on a device with a keyboard or touchscreen). My calculator of choice is an HP 50G. The HP 48 emulator on my Android phone can do most of what the 50G can do (and probably a lot faster), but as an emulated calculator on a touchscreen device, it ain't the same.

Do I use my programmable calculator every day? No, no I do not. Do I resent spending $120 on a calculator, compared to the cost of the chemistry textbook I bought for the same class? No, no I do not.

Re:Oh please, this comes up every six months

[Rich0]

Uh, the students are in fact required to buy certain models. Most classes restrict what kinds of calculators you're allowed to use on exams. Most would prohibit the use of netbooks.

So, the customer's ability to get what they really want is limited.

Yes and No

[fermion]

For general use, dedicated calculators have gone the way of dedicated mp3 players or feaure phones. I have an HP emulator on my iPhone as well as Wolfram!Alpha. Unless on loves he keyboard, which is not all ha easy o use, these to applications take the place of my huge HP 49 or TI-89 or whatever.

That said one can't use a smarphone on a test. That is why over the past 10 years calculators have no been designed for he professional, but for the testing companies. Pro features are removed to make it acceptable for the standardized test. Ad copy basically focuses on this. I believe the TI nspire even has an interchanabled keyboard that limit functionality so it can be used on tests.

I don't see any reason to teach the calculator other than it is a necessary test taking skill. As long as the public gives credence to the AP exam, as long as states believe calculators are more important than basic skills, as long as calculator manufactures pay politicians to require calculators in the classroom, we will have them. OTOH, it is much more likely to get a kid o use a calculator to do work, rather than a computer where they go off and play WOW.

Re:Yes and No

[IQgryn]

You made your point about the keyboard being difficult to use quite eloquently.

Power consumption

[Ironchew]

I haven't run any exact tests, but I've gotten a TI-83+ running on solar panels, in full sunlight, rated at 6V, 100 mA (600 mW). I also have an Eee PC 701 that consumes roughly 26 watts of power when it runs directly off the wall charger. I'm not sure how efficient today's netbooks are, but that's a big difference.

Re:Another viewpoint on calculators and exams...

[pclminion]

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.

Re:If it's not a fad pad, it's crippled!

[shutdown -p now]

For the cost of those calculators, they are crippled without any doubt.

Because

[Charliemopps]

Teachers are lazy. They expect students to come up with original un-plagiarized answers to test questions the teacher/professor hasn't updated in 20 years and probably copied wholesale from a textbook somewhere. If you really want original answers, come up with some original questions.

Re:a slightly less pessimistic perspective

[TheDarkMaster]

Graphical calculator? When I was in college, resulting graphs of the equations were made with a ruler and pencil.

Calculators on a Test?

[Kagetsuki]

Why can students use a calculator on a test to begin with? And a graphing calculator!? Then you're just testing how well they can use the calculator - no wonder Americans suck at math.

Re:Another viewpoint on calculators and exams...

[mysidia]

What's the point in "teaching" wood shop, if you let a power drill do 90% of the work when drilling holes?

Students should have to do it using hand screws, lest they become dependant on the newfangled lctricity!!

Crippled technology? Hell, why do we even allow calculators to be used in ANY exam? What's the point in "teaching" math if you let the calculator do 90% of the work?

Because calculators are a tool used by practitioners of mathematics, and students benefit from learning to use the tool to facilitate their work? Because arithmetic is simple, and it would be wasteful to just be constantly re-testing all that particular type of "work" on every test?

Don't take testing of students' ability to use a calculator for granted.... many students fail, even with advanced calculators fully allowed. To be successful in life, you have to learn how to use a calculator, and if math classes don't teach this and test you on it, many students won't get the required skill.

It turns out that in real math classes you actually have to have some idea what you are doing to be successful even with a calculator. This couldn't be more true than with word problems that sometimes involve many steps and pages of work, and require advanced problem solving --- the more work the calculator can do, the more time the student has to do work on the real math (problem solving), AND, therefore the more complex the problem can be, and the larger the amount of material that can be tested (the more advanced the thought that can be required of the student).

In other words use of a calculator is not harmful, and actually beneficial, if the examination method is effective, and accounts for the students' access to a calculator. Strategy for using the calculator in an appropriate way is also a problem solving consideration -- if the student uses their calculator inefficiently, or doesn't take a good problem solving approach, they will run out of time before they finish the exam. The introduction of this strategy element allows the exam to be made more challenging, and therefore.... taking the exam more rewarding / more educational an experience.

If you can't use a calculator, you won't go very far in modern maths. If you can use a calculator, 98% of the students will have their needs met; the 2% who go into advanced maths for maths sake are such geeks they will not be harmed by learning to use a calculator.

The keyboard

[hawguy]

For me, it's the fact that it's small, portable, and has a real keyboard.

If I have a bunch of numbers on paper to add up, I grab my HP-15C because I can set it right next to the paper, and I can use the keyboard to type the numbers on it much faster than doing it on my computer and having to look at the screen to compare with what's on the paper.

I have an RPN calculator on my smartphone, but it's not as usable as the calculator without a keyboard.

If I were doing graphics or anything more advanced, then I'd just use my computer. I have an old HP-48 which I never use because it's too complicated for anything non-trivial and for anything trivial, the HP-15C is better. When I bought it, it was great and I even wrote some programs to automate some tasks, but now it's much easier to use a real computer.

Standardize the calculators

[Dutchmaan]

A basic scientific calculator should be so cheap these days that they could just be added to the instructors budget and handed out to students and returned to the instructor during a test. I see no reason in this day and age where basic calculators shouldn't be as readily available as say, a pen.

RPN

[PPH]

I'm glad I made it through school before this idiocy of 'standard calculators' took hold and TI pushed HP out.

If they want to standardize on something, let them bring slide rules and/or a Curta. And stray off my lawn!

Re:I'm sorry it is a rip-off.

[spinkham]

The HP 35s sounds exactly like what you want.

I decided it was too rich for my blood, and bought a Casio FX-115ES for my bag carry calculator. Doesn't have RPN or equation storage, but what you do get for under $20 is quite impressive.

I too prefer HP calcs, and have HP 50G for home use, but it's too large and too expensive for me to keep in my bag.

I think you are missing the point

[davidwr]

The question is not "should graphing calculators exist" but "should $100 graphing calculators exist?"

If a low-end netbook cost 5 times as much as a graphing calculator instead of twice as much, we wouldn't be asking this question.

If it weren't for virtual "vendor lock in" dictated by testing agencies, book publishers, and other "high influence" players giving TI a near-monopoly, the price of these fancy not-a-computer graphing calculators would be more like $25-$50 instead of $80-$130. Oh, and netbooks would still cost the same as they do now.

The answer is REALLY obvious, Sd.

[xyourfacekillerx]

Honestly given ten seconds of pondering, it should easily make sense. Seems to me the anti-gc crowd are just on about superiority complex of mathematical ability and/or utilization of lesser known math tools.

1) Near universal standardization. Text books and labs across dozens of disciplines rely on common graphing calculators, as do instructors. The industry invested on this tech and no one wants to re-write the curriculum to support alternative tech. Most calculators do most tasks the same way; it's standard. Also, the education hardly relies on functionality greater than what GC provide, so why go elsewhere? and the educators don't have to worry about who has Windows/Linux/etc or who has which software or who can afford to pay the extra $100 ... or who didn't download a virus that crippled their system and prevented their math software from loading, so on and so forth. It makes sense to package these functions in an isolated, portable, dedicated calculating machine which gives consistent and predictable results! Additionally, because of the standardization, everyone knows how to use these things, and the learning curve is negligible for just about anyone.

2) Cost. Yes, more expensive devices can offer superior calculating power. But the educational needs are well-met by the GC, so going the distance and paying more makes absolutely no sense. Plus, as every student knows, GC's are VERY recyclable and the recovery of cost is normally as much as 75% ! Try selling your netbook at the end of the semester, see how far that gets you.

3) Ease of Use. The OP suggested students and educators, perhaps professionals, rely too much on GC tech, then suggested using even more sophisticated math software as a replacement? Forget that learning curve! And what about portability, battery life? I can pack up my calculator and go anywhere with it, very easily. The thing is superior to any other alternative on this point alone.

4) Dedicated device. This kind of overlaps in what I've mentioned before, but it's a very important point. The GC is dedicated to one of a handful of purposes. Replacing it with a multi-purpose machine, and the latter becomes more valuable to me as it suits other important uses. Storing music, running other software, all this interferes with the "focus" afforded by simply having a GC next to my textbook - I learn less effectively! Also, running calculations are not likely to be interrupted or erroneous on the GC as they are on the other devices (e.g. netbook) due to software flaws, machine crashes (i.e. iTunes freezes up!) and so on. I lose or damage my netbook, and replacement cost is prohibitive; whereas a used cheap GC is very easy to find these days. Hell, I keep ROM backups and emulation software of my GC's for just that reason. Also, who is going to lend out a netbook? Who is going to study group around a desktop PC or pass around a heavy laptop low on battery life among eight other friends in the study hall? I've loaned out my GC's dozens of times, and expect just about everyone to have one somewhere, so study group is way easier, and at work we each have one and that's so much better than "let's go to my office and load up X math software"

5) Dedicated device. Hate to over-emphasize, but it's important. I use my GC to solve all kinds of random problems in a flash, you know little debates you get at work over whose algorithm is more efficient, where a quick visual is crucial. Explaining to colleagues that their mess of a word problem is just a system of equations, that a solution exists or can easily be obtained? GC does it in five minutes.

Missing the point of math...

[interactive_civilian]

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.

There are a lot of posts like this, so apologies for singling you out... But, as a math teacher I have to say in response to the "but I never use this" ideas...

Though doing such things is required as class, mathematics is NOT and has never been about memorizing formulas, or even about using specific ones. Yes, we all know you probably don't use the quadratic formula in real life, nor to you have to find the rules for number sequences, nor do you have to find all of the number patterns you can in Pascal's triangle, nor do you have to use Pascal's triangle as a convenient shortcut for binomial expansions, nor do you have to do proofs using all of those uselessly memorized names and properties from your various classes, etc. Yes, you probably had to do all of these things and more in your math classes, but believe it or not, learning math is not really about these things.

Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems. Not just math problems, but ANY kind of problem you are likely to encounter in life. No, you won't ever use pythagorean theorem to solve relationship problems in your love life, but the logical and critical thinking styles you gained in your mind from solving problems in math will apply to you finding reasonable and logical solutions in real life.

Not only are you learning how to think in math, but you are learning how to break down your thinking so you can check it step by step to make sure there are no flaws. THAT is why we math teachers make you show your work. I, for one, don't care if you get the correct answer or not. I care about how you arrived at your answer, if you can show me the process you used to get to it, and if, in the case of an incorrect answer, you can find the flaw in your thought process that lead to your mistake. Tell me the ability to explain your thinking or the process you intend to engage in to reach a particular outcome is not an important and necessary life skill!

The fact that we use mathematics to try to teach these things is a side effect of what math is. But math class is not just for learning math. It is the class where you exercise your brain so that logical thinking and sustained reasoning become easier in all aspects of life.

And that is why learning to prove the quadratic formula, rather than programming the answer into your calculator, is important.

Re:Missing the point of math...

[bmo]

Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems. Not just math problems, but ANY kind of problem you are likely to encounter in life"

But it's not taught that way.

It's never taught that way in US schools. Ever. It's always taught as an abstraction without ever tying any of it to real life. Ever. (repetition for emphasis) So when students complain about not ever being able to use this stuff in real life, maybe you should listen and give some examples. Because I heard damn few examples from my math. Applied math was always somehow "dirty."

It's never about critical thinking. It's never about solving real life problems. It's always about passing the next test or quiz.

You make me so friggin' angry it's ridiculous.

And Euclid puts food on my table (machinist/toolmaker) so I know of what I speak.

--
BMO

Re:Missing the point of math...

[interactive_civilian]

It's never about critical thinking. It's never about solving real life problems. It's always about passing the next test or quiz.

And, again, you miss the point. I apologize if I didn't make that clear. It's not about directly solving real life problems. It's about learning the STYLE AND WAY OF THINKING LOGICALLY in order to solve real life problems.

The way math classes make you do this is by doing math problems, because math problems can only be solved by logical thinking and a logical application of mathematical properties. Doing this again and again, building in complexity over the years, doesn't just teach you to solve math problems, it teaches you HOW TO THINK about any problem. Just like muscular exercise builds up muscles that are used repetitively for some task that you want to be stronger at doing, the kinds of problems you do in math are brain exercises that build up, through repetitive use, the pathways that are useful for logical thinking.

I'm sorry if your teachers didn't make this explicitly clear to you. A lot of teachers don't. I, for one, do explain this to my students, because I understand very well that the level of math we are doing is not very interesting, the types of problems we solve with it are very contrived and not realistic (because the math required to solve "real" problems is way beyond these basics, but you must master the basics if you want to learn to do the advanced stuff), and a lot of the actual things we do in class are not very applicable themselves in real life. For most people, math is not exciting or interesting. But learning it gives the gifts of clear and logical thinking and the ability for sustained chains of reasoning.

I'm sure not many of my students get this, even though I have explained it to them, but that's simply a product of them being young and inexperienced with the world. If even a few of them come out of this class as clearer, more rational thinkers, then I've done my job well.

Re:Missing the point of math...

[reason]

If that were the aim, surely it would make more sense to teach formal logic and critical thinking, instead of maths.

Personally, I've found a lot of the maths I learnt in high school very useful in my day to day life. Probability and statistics most of all, but also geometry and even calculus from time to time.

Re:Missing the point of math...

[bradley13]

"...mathematics is NOT and has never been about memorizing formulas. ... Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems."

Bingo! When we learn to read, we begin with simple phonetics with simple words ("See Spot run"), then we are taken though a series of increasingly difficult texts. None of these texts are directly useful later in life. It's the same with math - you start out with basic operations, and move on the more complex topics. It may be that none of these specific items are useful later in life - it's the general ability to deal with mathematical concepts that is important.

Of course, the problem with cheating comes when one person writes this program, and twenty others copy it.

Re:Missing the point of math...

[Sir_Sri]

It's not the logic of solving problems you should be teaching. Anyone can do that, easily, with or without math. We call them arts grads. It's the quantitative analysis that's important. Ok so you aren't using the quadratic formula in your love life. It's the wrong tool. A statistical analysis of activities engaged in, money invested, the probability of loss due to breakup etc. are all very legitimate mathematical tools in to assess the risk/rewards involved in any relationship. Moreover you need to be confident in the validity of the tools you use to solve a problem. Take something simple, like choosing the specific shade of blue in the google logo, or the background on your corporate letterhead. Now, you can use a 'logical' approach, and feel good about appropriate contrast or the 'tone' the colour conveys. Or you can use survey people (how many is significant?), quantize the various options (how do you quantize them?), and view it as an optimization problem to pick the the optimal colour for the problem you are solving. The latter is the correct (if somewhat expensive) way to choose, the former is what you have arts majors for. If you are a 5 person company, the arts major approach is all fine and good. If you are nokia, google or IBM you damn well better have some actual analysis behind your choice of what font to use, what colour to use etc. because even subtle variations effect perception of your brand, and when you're a company worth 10's of billions of dollars, fractional percent shifts in the value of your brand equate to millions of dollars.

Most of what we learned in math, that seemed basically useless to everyone who wasn't going to be an engineer or a physicist (I was originally a physicist), ended up 15 years later hitting me in the head as a game developer. Quantitatively defining fun, defining the world all of those things are both mathy, and require a lot formal proofs of either correctness or at least derivations of whatever it is you're trying to solve. Computers simulate the world through math, and mathematical approximation, so by extension any field which requires computer models necessarily relies on math to build those tools accurately. The better you are at math, the better the models will be. If you want them to be fast, have good cache hit ratios, minimize memory use, etc. then you can come to a computer scientist. I note that I'm really a developer, not a designer. The designers come up with all these ideas on what would be fun, and I have to find a way to analytically assess them. Is this UI placement better or worse than that one? Is this area too hard or too easy? Solving those problems regularly requires derivations and proofs, and the developers have to come up with them themselves (they aren't just in a book somewhere I can look up), well ok, some tools are in books. But most of them are situational at best.

Do I use the quadratic formula? Not so much at the moment. Do I use its proof and derivation on a regular basis, absolutely. I'm working with a hex grid pathfinding algorithm, and I work with some curvalinear coordinate systems (not all of which are your standard spherical or cylindrical) to attach visual effects to various things. Not far off from where I thought I'd be 15 years ago (hex grids were all the rage in the 90's wargaming scene).

Applying numbers to real problems, either for simulator or for actual analysis, whether its' physical simulation or finance or the like, developing and understanding what your toolkit is, how to use it, and where it will fail is the point of teaching math. If your goal is a 'logical approach to problem solving' you're either on a course for people who won't ever be capable of using math to solve problems, or you're doing it wrong. How do you quantize it, how do you analyse it, how do you prove that your answer is optimal, or if it is intractably hard to optimize it, how efficient is it, and what approximations did you take to get here?

Re:Missing the point of math...

[Sir_Sri]

I would argue mathematical analysis is the only way to to provide insight about the world. Everything else is philosophy. If you can replace any philosophical theory with scientifically verifiable one, which is by definition based on math, you have obsoleted the philosophical theory with a better one. If you can't replace a philosophical theory (for example one related to politics or law and justice) with science then you are still better with a mathematical analysis of the problem which may be economic in nature rather than scientific.

Anyone can do logical reasoning and philosophical theories. Backing them up with mathematical analysis is what differentiate applyable, good theories from from the bad ones.

Re:I'm sorry it is a rip-off.

[silly_sysiphus]

The huge stack on my 48G+is nice, but the calculator I go back to again and again is the single-line (!) display on my 15C. And I grew up with the TI-83+ et all, so it's not even a matter of what I saw first. There has never been a better scientific calculator than the beast that is the 15C. The batteries last for decades, the buttons are perfect, and they're damn hard to kill at that. Too bad the only Voyager still sold is the 12C...I know an awful lot of 40+ year olds who wish they still had/had another 15C. Oh, and if you think the HP35 is a rip-off, try looking up what it costs to get a 15C today...

Best math class I ever had was open book

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:I'm sorry it is a rip-off.

[Z00L00K]

I'm happy that I have my HP 15C. I also have a 41CV.

Just too bad that HP decided to stop making the 15C, it has a great format, is competent and is easy to use. A modern version with more memory, a micro SD card slot and a faster processor would be sufficient. No reason to add any additional math functions.