Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators?

New submitter Covalent writes "I'm a science teacher and have, over the years, accumulated a number of lost graphing calculators (mostly TI-83s). After trying to locate the owners, I have given up and have been loaning them out to students as needed. I want to something more nerd-worthy with them, though. I would feel wrong for selling them. What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"

Comments

Your duty is clear:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

CALCnet allows networking of TI-83 and similar calculators with relatively simple external hardware.

With that detail out of the way, you are free to implement a display-wall and/or the most powerful z80 cluster computer in the known universe.

Extra credit, of course, will be awarded if you succeed in writing an xorg driver that can treat an MxN array of networked calculators as a greyscale display of appropriate resolution.

Keep on keepin' on

[Amorymeltzer]

Please keep doing what you're doing. I had my graphing calculator stolen in high school, and was not happy about having to shell out the cash for a new one. I had a test later that day that required one, so I went to the head of the department and she reached into a box marked "graduated" and pulled one out. She put every found calculator that came her way into a box labelled with that year. Four years later she moved it into the graduated box, understanding that the student had since left and would not be claiming their lost property. She simply handed me one and said not to worry about it. A decade later I still use it.

Loan them to nerds-to-be

[Sarten-X]

A story I've kept for years as inspiration. A hundred points to anyone who can find the source:

One of the best parts of high school was when my math teacher took a spare TI-83 and let me use it exclusively for the whole semester, under specific terms: Do something awesome with it, and he'd let me skip my final.

Three weeks later, I'd written a small text adventure. A few weeks after that, I had a trading game with a complex market. By the end of the year, I had turned that same trading game into a graphical one, where the goal was to sail around the world buying low and selling high. The more money you had, the more likely you were to be attacked, which also took place in stunning 1-bit color graphics. The game's actions were controlled through a menu system, which was also used to launch the game (as opposed to the various tools I'd written to do my homework for me).

He was impressed, and I was inspired. When I started applying to colleges, I finally knew what major I wanted: computer science.

Keep loaning out those calculators. A student might need one, and not even realize it.