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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?"
Use them, give them away for free or send them to EA to produce more great intros like this one WHOHOO!
They're junk... give them away if you can find someone who wants them.
Who thought this deserved the front page? Smack yourself in the head.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You're loaning them to the needy. Doing good can be nerdy too.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Send one to Paul Ryan - he could do with help with his math
I think that loaning them out to needy students is the best possible use for them. Don't change a thing!
Give them to students who cannot otherwise afford them.
continue to lend them out and don't stress if one disappears (or rather: never returns). if you ever figure out who didn't return one, clue in their teacher they're an secret math student?
Beowulf Cluster
I also have a number of graphing calculators. That number being 1. How many is 'a number'! If its a complex or irrational number, your post would be more interesting. Otherwise, apart from some kind of modern art installation, the calculator lending library you already have seems like a good answer.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
There are plenty of kids out there whose parents won't justify spending $100 on anything educational, so just keep those calculators on hand in your classroom and loan them out to students who need them. In doing so, you're giving underprivileged kids the same resources that more well-off children always have at their disposal, and hopefully by having the same tools as their peers, you can keep them engaged, interested, and learning.
That's nerd-worthy to me.
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.
Loaning is probably OK, but before you donate or otherwise give up possession, check the rules.
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't know about your school, but in every one of my middle school and high school math classes, students always needed more loaner calculators than they had. (my college banned calculators from math classes, which didn't really hurt since all I took was Calc II).
If you find that students are consistently being responsible and bringing their own, I suggest donating them to another school, so they can get some use from them.
There's not really anything interesting you can do with them - they aren't powerful enough to do anything other than do simple math, or perhaps play a mediocre Wolfenstein clone on (yes, it's real - google "ti-83 doom app"). The displays are shit, the processor is pathetic, and the input mechanism is severely lacking.
"What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"
Ummmm..... Math?
On a more serious note, I'll go with Revotron's suggestion of keeping some on hand to give to kids whose parents can't or won't purchase one for them. If you still end up with extras, there are plenty of places which take old electronic devices and donate them to needy families and/or recycle them. Even a non-working device may be useful as spare parts for such places.
http://hackaday.com/2010/12/16/peer-network-using-graphing-calculators/
A TI-83 costs $80-$110. Surely you have students in your current classes who can't afford that. If you were to lend one to one of those students, and tell them to keep it at the end of the year, you'd potentially have a very constructive role in that child's life.
Beowulf Clusters?
Not because it's effective, but because you can!
If you have more calculators than you need for your own lending program, and the other math teachers (if any) at your school are also adequately equipped, then share them with other schools in your area. There's probably a classroom not too far down the road - perhaps across the tracks? - where they don't have a large number of kids carelessly abandoning valuable electronics.
~Idarubicin
Donate them to local Charities or over seas charities.
The Lend them out program you're doing works well also.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Of course there is a Siicon Heaven. Where would all the calculators go?
You're doing the right thing by offering the calcs out to students who don't have one.
Doing good > Being a nerd
Key in 5,318,008, turn the calculator upside down, then smile with fifth grade satisfaction.
You don't want to get fired for trying to do the right thing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I dunno, how about checking what the latest nerd hipster chic is at BoingBoing and modifying the calculator accordingly?
Let's see ...
Cover in leather
Paint to look like R2D2
Haunted Mansion theme.
Yeah, no shortage of nerd things to do to old crap.
I'd avoid using tapeworms. But steam punk might still be acceptable in some circles.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'd suggest finding a charity that would provide them to schools in Africa.
If they're solar, donate them to some third world schools.
What's the difference between Red Dwarf and Futurama?
Futurama has a Robot Hell.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because you tore the phone number label off.
We need to know
The most "nerd-worthy" use would be taking them to the local shooting range as plinking targets.
Loaning these to students is doing them a disservice -- get some HPs if you want to do that. (Oh wait, you can't get lost HPs for free, because they're worth keeping track of.)
Anyway, I think TI-83s have Z80 CPUs, so you could always tear them apart and build a sick CP/M machine -- a sibling and I built a YASBEC when we were kids, but there's plenty of schematics for various computers you can choose from. Or, write your own BIOS and load CP/M on the calculator (the signing keys are available now), and spend the rest of your life cursing your tiny screen and keyboard.
I'd shoot 'em.
Link them together and use them to mine bitcoins. You might need to pay a few students to type in the numbers, but you will be richly rewarded.
To teach in a district that has no needy kids and can all afford $100 for a graphing calculator. What's wrong with what you were doing and lending them out to kids who need them?
Donate them to some third world country / school? Combine it with a project to collect more calculators, I for example, have several collecting dust that I would gladly donate in such a case.
Where else would all the old calculators go?
meh
To loan to his students. That's what mine does. And, who wants to spend $100 on a calculator they're only going to need in one class?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
When you have enough, take them down to the calculator store and trade them for a good one that does RPN.
Have gnu, will travel.
Put some games on them. Or periodic table software. I love TI-83s, mostly because you can put your own software on it. Had some sort of a skating game on mine at one point. Also Tetris, Falldown, Snake, those pyramid puzzles for some reason...
A beowulf cluster of these could surely run that japanese AI that's so good at passing math tests. Once your school's test scores rise, the federal government will give you more money. Profit.
All you socialists could do with some help with your math too. You're always insisting that 2+2=4 and 1+1=2. But we conservative free thinkers know that 2+2 is really equal to 17. Don't listen to the lib'rul media!
or give them away to students who need them.
Nuke them from orbit - the only way to be sure
Considering the Lunar Module on the Apollo missions had a computer with the equivalent power of a TI-83...the sky is literally the limit.
Seesion and join in Have somebody just AMERICA) is the
Put on Bubble Bobble 83 for some 2P link game action.
As a matter of objective fact, the nerdiest thing you can do with a TI-83 is to write assembly programs for it on your PC, send them to the calculator through the proprietary* cable (if you've got one) and run them. If you don't have time to do it then maybe you have a student who has time. Challenge your students to write a simple program that draws something on the screen!
*It goes without saying that it would be nerdier if you built your own cable and used that.
My friend used to draw some mad calculator porn using the draw program. Since you work with kids maybe porn isnt the best idea. Maybe a LOST sign across four calculators that you could hang. Or you could do math formulas and hang it in the classroom. You'd need external power sources. I'd second the comment to ask on boing boing or apartment therapy since slashdot users seem to not be very artistic based on the comments so far.
5318008
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Actually, I am surprised at the lack of tablet/smartphone graphing applications that replicate and enhance the functionality provided by the dedicated graphing calculators.
Loaning them out when needed seems a perfectly suitable solution to the problem. Maybe get them to write some games - that was popular back in the day.
Or to draw the batman logo as an algorithm.
Make your own cloud
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I think that our Chancellor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor_of_the_Exchequer could do with a few !!
The TI-83 and especially the 84 are powerful easy to use and learn devices for programming.
In highschool my algebra teacher actually went into loops, and the math text book had blurbs how to program and i taught myself BASIC that way. Youve got an 8x16 character lcd screen, OR something around 94x180 pixels you could directly address. ie collision detection in a 2d game.
Hey developers, what if you had a pocket sized device you had to carry anyway that you could program on with 0 hurdles. I've passed my calculator down to my brother who used some of my programs as they were and learned from the rest to make his own.
If this inspires you, get an 84 not an 83, its got a better screen, and isnt slow, its got twice the speed and storage. Both are bottlenecks on the 83.
Create a clip of the song "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator".
http://xkcd.com/768/
Eventually, some of those calculators may stop working, Why not expand your pedagogical uses beyond the math/science classroom? Hand the old broken models off to a club like FIRST and let your students get some experience taking apart electronics- even among prospective engineering students, surprisingly few people ever get to do that as kids. Or hand some live calculators off and let your students learn programming.
Helping students to avoid paying for wildly overpriced electronics is a noble goal, but remember that these devices have more classroom uses than just arithmetic.
Why on Earth would anyone want to miss out on the shear joy of manually working through a maths problem by using a calculator?
Bazinga.
You can try getting various zilog z80 based software to run on it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-83_series
Oh, and keeping them as "loaners" for students who loose theirs or otherwise can't afford one would be awesome too. Times are tough.
When I was in high school ages ago I used hacked calculators as programmable measuring instruments. If you crack them open and solder a pair of wires across the '=' key, you can attach those leads to momentary switches on your test subject. For one of them I used a reed switch mounted on a bicycle fork, attached a magnet to a spoke, and then typed in the circumference of the wheel as an addition: 0 + (circumference). When the wheel turns it just 'clicks' the equals key for every revolution thus becoming an accurate odometer. (The '=' key on most calculators repeat the last operation)
Mathematics, of course!
thank you, ill be here all weekend, tip your waitresses. try the fish.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I loaned one out to my cousin and never saw it again. I remember writing games for that thing too... checkers, reversi, hex, nym, etc. fun little basic programming environment with pixel-level graphics. (not too speedy though) So atm I just use my old TI-35 for basic stuff.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
In an era of smart-phones (and soon virtual reality glasses, brain implants, etc), specialized calculators are a window onto the past. Think like an archaeologist. Treat them as flint arrowheads of a long-gone civilization... Try to collect as much data as you can!
Photograph them with a microscope. Jump around the electromagnetic spectrum. Search for fingerprints. (This should ideally be done as soon as you acquire a lost calculator, and you should always avoid contaminating it with your own biological residue.) A myriad of tiny details can be observed: scratches, chemical analysis of attached dirt, wearing out of button resistance, etc, etc, etc. Create a 3D model of the object, overlaying all of this metadata. Perhaps an autopsy would reveal interesting metadata to overlay over its electronic schematic. Perform all sorts of fun mathematical analysis about what you can ascertain about the "life" ("physical" and "mental") of each calculator, and what statistical projections can be made about their life in the wild. Which model gets sneezed on the most? Do oils from corn chips use exponents more often? What deductive theories would a 21st century Sherlock Holmes form from those patterns? Go nuts - within reason. And, needless to say - publish everything online.
Then, if someone shows up to claim a lost calculator, dominance of fingerprints and/or DNA matching their body on the object in question would constitute reasonable circumstantial evidence. (For greater assurance, a waiting period may be prudent, in case there are any conflicting claims (ex. that the calculator was borrowed), but that might not be worth the inconvenience.)
The human civilization is moving forward at an ever-accelerating rate. We will soon see the passing of the last generation of homos preiphonus. Future generations will know the daily Twitterbabble of today's 13-year-old girls, but they won't know much about the lives of her pre-digital parents. Unless we collect as much data as we can, many valuable insights into who we and our parents were may disappear down the memory hole forever!
--libman
Sell the calculators as they are losing value being obsolete. Put the cash you make into a long term investment account. If they owners never claim, you make money. If they come back for them they will be ever thankful - and you could sell the story, too.
I would suggest singing 'Pocket Calculator' by Kraftwerk. For those unfamiliar with the song, one of the key lines is "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" along with catchy lyrics such as "I am adding ... and subtracting".
Oh, and obigatory xkcd.
Donate them to some poor schools in a third world country.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Keep the best of them for lending as needed.
The teachers I know all have a list of things they need in their classroom that they are trying to acquire. So sell the rest and use the proceeds for those classroom needs that you would otherwise have to buy yourself, fight for, or do without.
I just bought an TI nSpire in a thrift shop in USA on my vacation, with the accompanying software and all. ...when I came home to start using it, the software told me that the registration no# had already been used, and isn't valid for use anymore. So no Updating my TI :(
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Hand them out to "Trick-or-treater"s...
durn kids with their fancy graphing calculators showing plotted functions on a screen! In my day we used our Slide Rules to record cartesian pairs and plotted the points on graph paper (which we drew our own X and Y axis and put in the divisions, yup #2 pencil, not a fancy mechanical nosirree!)
Yup takes the fun out of computing a function by hand, and seeing where it ends up on your paper graph...
I miss my slide rule
It wouldn't be as wrong to sell them if you used the money to buy a bunch of Raspberry Pi units instead. You'd get a better, more educational product, and the per unit cost is actually less than for those antiquated calculators.
Sounds like you are being taught by a bunch of old fossils who have no idea how things are done these days. So you are wasting your time doing menial math tasks that could and should be automated by a calculator or Matlab, which of course slows the rate that you can learn the important stuff.
Here we use Matlab everywhere, the associate department head posted some great videos on how to do inverse Laplace transforms using your TI-89 to greatly accelerate the process, and so on.
The smart thing is to have the school sell them at a discounted rate (but they need to be qualified like if they are in the reduced/free lunch program) and have the profits go to the school fund. I agree that giving it away to kids by stating they only qualify because they are needy isn't enough. There is no easy criteria to put it into the needy versus the greedy. There are plenty of people out there who have no real sense of money. It could be a family that could be living paycheck to paycheck but have $150,000 a year income; or it could be a poor family on welfare somehow has an ipad, iphone and nintendo ds. We don't need to baby people, we need them to be smarter with their money. If a calculator screws up their future by not having them give them away calculator, then so be it. Babying the kids just shows that it is ok to be spending their money without investing in the future. While my solution isn't perfect, it's better than raising another generation to be unwise with their money.
Have you tried polling your classes for ideas on nerd-worthy endeavours for the calculators? You might be surprised by what they come up with.
Q;" What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"
A;"use 'em to solve old equations."
ti83boobi.es is free. Post one a day.
I personally love the calculator input method (mostly)!
In fact, I use SAGE and OCTAVE (sometimes MATLAB) fairly regularly and would love to figure out how to either interface a TI-89-esq calculator to act as an input device or remap the keys (and I assume create macros?) to function similarly. I know some things are easier to type out (depending on what exactly you're doing), but being a relative novice (and so using basic functions and lots of actual numbers all the time) it'd be nice to have a number pad that was near a collection of buttons where each one was, e.g., cosine, sin, log, e^(, common variables, etc. Typing out "cos" or "exp()" etc. every time is really labor intensive and prone to mistakes.
Anyway, I looked for such a way of doing things and haven't found any; I also know nothing about setting up a custom keyboard with macros and having it interface with SAGE (though I do know how to switch to the dvorak keyboard and can change my hot-keys :-P )
So my idea, then, is to use them to build interface devices for mathematical computer programs!!! (then send me on; my name is Anonymous Coward)
Spoken like a true naive right-wing American who wants desperately to believe that poverty is the result of some moral failing on the part of the poor, and therefore can never touch them or their loved ones.
Sorry, but the world doesn't work that way.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
When I was in school people made their own games and things with them. Now, create your own cloud computing platform which uses its CPU for calculations.. With enough of them you might be able to equal the power of a modern cell phone or wristwatch ;-)
All kidding aside, like (mostly) everyone else, I recommend either holding on to them to use as loaners in the classroom, or give them away. Try to remember if you were in a situation (temporarily or even long term) where you didn't have a calculator for whatever reason in class (especially as a kid). Wouldn't this have made you feel better?
http://hackaday.com/tag/ti-83/
http://www.ticalc.org/basics/calculators/index.html
http://www.ticalc.org/hardware/cables/serial.html
http://education.ti.com/guidebooks/sdk/83p/sdk83pguide.pdf
http://sami.ticalc.org/irlink/e_hard.htm
http://smallrobot.bizland.com/Instructions.pdf
http://www.mathinscience.info/public/mathbots_challenge/mathbot_chall_lesson.htm
http://www.razorrobotics.com/knowledge/?title=TI_Connect
http://www.free-scientific-calculator.com/texas-instruments-graph-link-connectivity-kit/
http://blog.makezine.com/2006/02/19/how-to-connect-a-ti83-to/
How is giving it away to every Joe and Sally going to accomplish anything? I had to get a TI-82 for my classes in high school back in the day, but I was told by my father if I got one; then I need to give up getting any video game for my birthday. I got my TI-82 and gave up a SNES game (cost about the same). So you're telling me I should have expected a teacher and demand them to give me a $70-80 calculator so I can get a video game as a birthday present? World works more twisted than what most people are proposing. Last time I checked, TI calculators make it faster to do the graphing but aren't necessary. And the majority of kids would opt for a video game over the calculator. If the kid was good at math a TI calculator wouldn't make a huge difference. My suggested solution is to sell them at a low reduced price for those who qualify and take the profits into school budget. So what is your solution? Give it away randomly to the poor and only have an extreme minority will benefit (because a TI calculator isn't going to make them pro at mathematics).
for Math calculations of course!
Calculators, so 20th century, like typewriters, wrist watches, polaroid cameras and POTS telephones.
Seriously, what would you need a calculator for? Your cheapo phone has enough arithmetic capability for high school needs. If you need to learn graphing, you plot it by hand.
Take all the the little LCD displays and make a giant LCD B&W TV with them.
Do you have tiny child-like hands and a soldering gun?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
middle C is 440 hz, and with a bunch of them you can write all the parts to a sheet of music.
A friend of mine in highschool wrote 6 or 8 parts of Cortez and played them on our HP48sx's
now that's nerd points.
Doesn't anyone else remember playing games on the graphing calculators?
Hold one up to your ear to talk to yourself in public without scrutiny. Unless you would rather pretend to be using bluetooth.
Be a hero to a college student and raffle them off to college students at the beginning of semester and donate the cash to AAAS or something. My $0.03.
Where's my sock? There it is...
Sell them cheaply (or give them away, but then you dont make any money) to students that cant afford them. Those things are pretty expensive, particularly for low income students, even if you sell them for 20 dollars or so (still a full profit, since you didnt buy them), its still much more affordable than buying full price. The only way I was ever able to get one (Im a sophmore in high school right now) was being lucky enough to find a Ti84 someone left in math. Or have the kids interested in electronics and such come in after school or something and let them see what they can come up with (may lead to broken calculators from failed attempts at who knows what). Same could be done with broken ones probably.
Agree, check the rules first. You don't want to get fired for doing the wrong thing. My understanding of lost property is that for values above a certain dollar amount, you need to return it or make reasonable assurances of being able to return it. (For items of low/no dollar value, I understand it is considered de minimis - but the TI-83 sells new for about $100, which I don't consider de minimis.) You said you "would feel wrong for selling them" so you seem to know there's an issue of proper ownership here.
I understand wanting to do something nerd-worthy with this old gear. And I'd bet that no one will come looking for them again anyway. But the right thing to do here is to hand them over to authorities. Start with your school administration, probably your campus police (if you have one) or whatever department seems connected with legal issues. Let them tell you what to do next.
Maybe you'll be lucky and they'll come back with "we don't consider this to be valuable property, do what you want". In that case, you can do nerd-worthy things with them, or donate them, or sell them. But you'll have someone in authority giving you permission to do so.
More likely is they'll take them and store them somewhere, and you'll never see them again. Which is too bad, but it's still the right thing to do.
http://www.willitblend.com/
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I miss just holding it.
Isn't there a Linux distro for them?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
How about a beowulf cluster? It should have about as much power as a Keurig.
If you wanted a calculating device, you bought a slide rule. You can still buy new-in-box Pickett's today.
The intent of the teacher was that if we didn't know how to do the math by hand, then having a calculator would just make us unable to do it by hand in the future.
Many tetri concurrently
So, FYI, it's not the Republicans who are standing in the way of a Federal Budget over the last few years.
The democrats are cowards who are unwilling to put out a budget that reflects what they want, and have a discussion on it.
The republicans are thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and unwilling to negotiate on anything, which makes it pointless for the democrats to propose a budget or try to negotiate a republican-proposed budget.
So if you are trying to claim that the republicans are somehow without blame in the situation, you are dead fucking wrong. If you want to say instead that they do not own 100% of the blame, there is some truth to that argument.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Send them to another school or classroom that doesn't have enough calculators.
...like Zaphod Beeblebrox's 'used Biro business'.
I lost one of those years ago when they worth a lot of money. No one spent anytime trying to get mine back to me. NOW GIVE IT BACK!