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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?"
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!
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.
Yup.. It's about the same as if I had asked "I get old computer stuff abandon with me. What should I do with it?" . I give it to people who want or need it.
In other industries, there is a standard 90 day storage.. After that, they can do with it as if it is their own. If it's legally titled stuff (like a car), you have to request a court ordered transfer of ownership. Something like a calculator? If the owner didn't come get it, it's yours.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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
I'd say give them to students that look like they have need for them and no way to get one, though the idea of just using them in-class is pretty good. Maybe make a prize out of it?
Key in 5,318,008, turn the calculator upside down, then smile with fifth grade satisfaction.
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.
It turns on instantly, does what it's supposed to do correctly the same way each time, and turns off instantly. I have a TI-83 on my desk at all times. The user interface can't be beat either.
Mostly random stuff.
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.
Being Junk is debatable. What matters is they retail for $100 and up, and scores of high school math courses require them. My Algebra II class (in 1998) might as well have been retitled to "How to use your TI-83 calculator" Class tutorials often worked buttonpress by buttonpress. I lost 3 of them over the course of my high school career (two were stolen from my bookbag), and this was certainly no fun for my parents.
Yes, I realize the older models sell for cheap on ebay. I purchased my 3rd this way and still have it (I suspect it was stolen too), but when you've got an assignment due tomorrow, and even if you get an extension from the teacher, you risk falling behind, so you often bite your lip and pay Best Buy prices.
I wish they weren't so expensive. They shouldn't be. With the exception of some tiny crappy memory expansions, they haven't changed in like 20 years, yet the price tag has only gone up. I'd love to see some project like OLPC destroy this monopoly.
Yes it can. See: HP 48GX/SX.
Every student in my wife's 2nd grade class qualifies for the free and reduced lunch program, which puts them all at or below the poverty level. And they all seem to have Nintendo DS's.
All I'm saying is, teachers need to stop using their personal resources in the classroom. As long as they're willing to give things to the students, the school system will continue to encourage them to do so. Let the parents figure out how to provide calculators for their children. That's not the teacher's responsibility.
Your posts are insightful. You don't need to be an asshole.
:wq
"Nobody poor should ever get to enjoy themselves."
Look, I understand prioroty spending and budgeting, but you have to look at the costs and the humanitarian factor here.
A DS will cost what, $150? Maybe it's a birthday present. I know that a fair number of the families at my kids' school don't get breakfast every day, and at Gift Day time, it gets worse. Why? The families can afford food and clothing to get by, but then when you add in $X for presents, it doesn't work out so well. That's where hampers can come in. They don't have to splurge on the food for the feast, it takes the pressure off the food bill for a couple of weeks, and suddenly they've got a couple hundred for presents.
Maybe the kid's got a paper route and works their butt off to pay their phone bill / buy DS games. I had a paper route when I was a kid.
Now, let's look at the cost of lunches. It's going to run, let's say, $2.50 for a lunch for the kids. If the parents are below the poverty level (which you would if you're making min. wage) that lets you take that $2.50 a day and spend it on other things. Clothes. Bling. That's about 3 months worth of subsidized lunches for a DS. (I know, you're all like "THATS MY TAX MONEY I DONT USE GOVT MONEY AT ALL" when you're drinking EPA-approved water, driving on DOT roads approved by a PE, in a car regulated by the NHTSA, and all while you're protected by the police, fire department, and military. But other than that, no tax dollars, right?)
And bling is fucking important when you're in high school.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
TI holds a monopoly thanks to their sole approval with Educational Testing Service for use on the ACT and SAT exams.
Any calculator would be fine, TI and ETS would have you believe that anything else would be a cheating device.
That's why they go to such ridiculous lengths to make them difficult to hack (encrypted loaders, secret keys, etc).
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
$150? That'd be a 3DS. A new DS is $100 from Best Buy. $70 if you get a refurbished one. Go down to GameStop, and you can get a used one for even less. Hit a pawn shop or ebay, and you can go even lower. I'd be willing to bet that Goodwill and similar places have some for sale fairly cheaply as well.
And don't forget, even the poor have relatives. Mom & Dad may be too proud to take money from their parents or siblings, but you can bet the kids won't mind getting a shiny new electronic toy for a birthday or Christmas from their aunt, uncle, or grandparent. And going back to the used bit above, a lot of younger kids get consoles and such as hand-me-downs from an older brother or sister in high school or college... who may have bought it with their own money, from their own job.
My family wasn't poverty-level poor when I was a kid, but we were poor... and quite a few of the nicer toys that I got came from my oldest brother, who went into the Navy right out of high school, and was flush with cash for a few years, until he decided to move off-base.
I could have never afforded a TI graphing calculator in high school, and it was required for Calculus, so the school gave them out akin to a text book. You had your serial number recorded and if you lost it, you didn't graduate until you paid for it. The things I was able to learn and do punching on that thing day in and out were infinitely valuable. I was even able to sign out a second one so that I didn't have to purge the programs I made for class. If there is such an excess, giving them to people who really can use them is a great idea
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Best idea so far. The TI-83 is a good enough graphing calculator for most. I can't imagine the sticker shock parents in low income homes get when their kid says we need a $100+ calculator. Also how many kids are avoiding higher level math because their household can't afford a calculator? Also the used market for graphing calculators dries up at the beginning of the school year.
I was on a field trip school field trip(winter) and one immigrant kid was crying he was so cold. I loaned him my oversized gloves and hat that day and gave the principal some high-tech gloves and hat to give to the kid the next day. There is no way that kid is getting a graphing calculator out of his parents.
I ask my kids if any of their classmates need a computer as I often end up with an older computer every few months. Again critical for homework but unaffordable in many homes.
We slashdotters probably look at things like the raspberry pi as a toy for some cool robot project but personally I suspect that one of the biggest impacts they will have will be a small number of industrious kids who make them their home computer and then are able to get ahead educationally.
So to the OP, you have a pile of life changing resources there; so go change some lives.