Slashdot Mirror
Full Review of the Color TI-84 Plus
KermMartian writes "The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition isn't the first color-screen graphing calculator, or even TI's first color calculator, but it's a refresh of a 17-year-old line that many have mocked as antiquated and overpriced. From an advanced review model, the math features look familiar, solid, and augmented with some new goodies, while programming looks about on par with its siblings. The requisite teardown uncovers the new battery, Flash, ASIC/CPU, and LCD used in the device. Although there are some qualms about its speed and very gentle hardware upgrades beyond the screen, it looks to be an indication that TI will continue this inveterate line for years to come."
Lots of screenshots and pictures of the innards too.
Does it have RPN?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Power: Rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, ~5-10 hours of use
Battery Life: Officially 5 days of classroom use or 2 weeks of homework use
"
That's really, REALLY crappy! for a 15Mhz, 1287k ram device! i would have espected at least ten times that!
emulate on an emulator. On your smartphone. Free and better.
And not allowed in the classroom settings that these things are mainly used. Too easy to switch to notes/google/more powerful apps.
The target market for this calculator is high school.. How many slashdotters are in high school?
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Standardized testing is the only reason I ever had a specialized calculator like this (TI-89). Now that I am out of school it has just been collecting dust in my desk drawer.
Graphing calculators are typically banned anyway.
What evidence do you have for this statement?
The most you'll be taking a test with is a TI-30.
I guess my daughter's math classes (AP math and AP statistics) are outliers then. They're all required to use a TI-84/85.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Pity the article was too darn lazy to summarize the tech specs:
CPU: custom z80 @ 6 / 15 MHz
LCD: 320x240, 16-bit
RAM: 128K of internal RAM, 21K user-accessible
ROM: 4MB Flash ROM chip, 3.5MB user-accessible.
IO: serial port, miniUSB jack
Keys: 50 dedicated keys
Programming languages: TI BASIC, z80 Assembly
Pity people couldn't provide benchmarks of couple common integrals across the HP48GX, HP49, HP50, TI-82, TI-84, so we can see how fast it is.
Because teachers are paranoid the chill'ins will cheat in class. Anything with a radio is verboten as a matter of course, and likewise anything "too powerful" isn't allowed. Finagle forbid they actually spend braincycles on solving a problem and leave the arithmetic to something that's designed to crunch numbers quickly and correctly. Far better to keep them busy doing busy work.
Of course any smart phone today could run Derive in a DOS emulator and probably still have enough cycles left over to play Angry Birds, but that would make math "too easy." Can't have that...
Funny story: Talked to a physics teacher (high school level) ages ago in a school where they standardized on HP's line rather than TI's. HP's did infrared communications whereas TI typically requires a physical cable to "network" between devices. The teacher said one day he looked up from his desk during a test and noticed a bunch of mirrors and prisms strewn about the room with students carefully aiming their calculators. Being an extremely cool teacher, he said something to the effect of, "I know what you're doing, but you had to use physics to make it work, so I'll let it slide once. Get ride of the glass and don't do it again."
The requirement of TI-84/85 in so many classes and standardized tests is a freaking sin. It's almost like a government granted monopoly that fills Ti's coffers, despite equal or better alternatives existing since the whole graphing calculator became an option (I say "almost like" because my understanding is that most of these testing agencies and schools are not being controlled directly by the central government and merely make the decision out of laziness and not wanting to review new or competing technology). TI has never needed to lower their price despite nearly no change in the base design and yet an increasing market and cheaper components. Sad.
Crunching the night's XP for PC's and henchmen at the dinner table. That's about it.
Students shouldn't be allowed to use things they don't understand. Calculators are for solving thousands of calculations and calculations with large numbers. Students should know how to do the same work by hand using smaller sets of calculations and smaller numbers.
If you don't understand the math, you won't be able to know if the answer your calculator gave you is right or how to find the problem if it's wrong.
It's not about making math "too easy." It's about actually understanding math. It's about learning how to actually solve problems and think logically. Just plugging it into a calculator doesn't teach you much. Any monkey can do that.
Work Safe Porn
A full CAS, the Ti-84 was a good calculator, I loved mine and it worked great. However it fell short for me because it lacked a good CAS, hence why I bought a Ti-89 Titanium. I know a lot of people, engineers included wonder why anyone would bother getting a calculator with a CAS built in, it's simple, why do algebra by hand and risk making a mistake when your calculator can do it MUCH faster, more accurate and in most cases with a better final answer.
Is it really cheating, or are their tests simply flawed? It sounds like their tests ask you to answer poorly-thought-out questions that don't actually test a student's critical thinking abilities. Probably the typical, "Here's an equation right in front of your face. Now mindlessly repeat those steps you should have memorized in class to solve the equation."
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Oh, I totally agree. I can sort of understand the requirement for having some sort of calculating device that isn't also a smart phone, even though I think that cheaters eventually are going to suffer for the cheating.
I think that slide-rules should be brought back into the high school level. Some can be expensive, but not as much as a graphing calc and it's probably best to learn how to do the math with paper and pencil to really get the deeper understanding rather than "learn how to use the damn calculator first before you try and learn the damn math."
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
It can keep a battery charge for more than a couple days.
I believe the OP was referring to standardized tests. If memory serves, when I took the ACT graphing calculators were forbidden since you could easily store all manner of cheat sheets onboard.
If that's the case, it wasn't clear to me. So, yeah, I guess that's reasonable.
My other comment was to bring back use of a slide-rule and all of these particular technological issues regarding cheating all go away.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
emulate on an emulator. On your smartphone. Free and better.
And not allowed in the classroom settings that these things are mainly used. Too easy to switch to notes/google/more powerful apps.
It does highlight a major problem with our education system: the reason TI-84s cost so much is because they're required in so many high school math classes. As the summary states, they're antiquated and overpriced. Of course, the cost is negligible to middle class and well off families, so it's just one more factor that holds back those in poverty. Let's face it, there are a lot of bad parents out there who, given the choice between putting their child in a class that requires a $100 calculator and sticking them in Math-4-Dummies, they'll choose the latter.
It's a similar to the well known problem with textbooks.
In many ways this reminds me of the absurdly high price of a version of Microsoft Office. It could be sold at a profit at a fraction of the price it's currently at, but people 'need it' despite the fact that the functionality isn't unique or costly. Microsoft's lock-in is formats that don't play nice, Texas Instruments' lock-in is textbooks they've built relationships with and teachers who can't think outside the box.
Hopefully one day Sal Khan kills textbooks as we know them today and FOSS/ODF just flat out kills MS Office.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I don't know about ACT, but the math sections of the SAT Reasoning Test require the student to provide a scientific or graphing calculator, and this graphing calculator cannot have a touch screen or QWERTY-arranged keyboard.
When I was in high school and college, we were permitted to use these types of calculators (in my case the HP 48G back in the late 80's early 90's.. I forget exactly when), however the teacher would walk around to each persons desk and hold in the factory reset button, and remove any mem cards (the PSION my friend used to have).
There was never any need to store formulas or anything, as those were provided on a separate sheet in addition to the test questions and answer paper (okay.. it was a huge sheet that included pretty much every formula used in science, math, chemistry, electrical and mechanical eng, so if you did not already know the formula, you would not be able to pick it out of the list anyways.. or rarely)
This was in South Africa many years ago.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
We used them when I was teaching introductory calculus as a grad student in the 90's.
A smartphone's certainly capable enough, but I can still think of a number of advantages to a special-purpose calculator:
But sure maybe some day it will make sense to require everyone to have a phone and standardize on some single calculator app.
SAT and AP exams, as well as all AP in-class tests, allowed TI-82/83/89s.
The 89 MIGHT have been banned on one or two of those, owing to its ability to factor algebraic expressions and to perform integration / differentiation.
Unfortunately, there's this thing called the "College Board". They make the SATs.
The most difficult math course I ever took was my first college math course, Calc II with Maple. Why yes, use of the symbolic calculus program Maple was so important to the class it was in the name. We took our tests at a workstation with Maple on it.
When my adviser suggested I take this version instead of normal Calc II, I didn't hesitate because I naively assumed this would make the class easier.
Turns out that when you remove the time it takes to do the actual mechanics of taking integrals and derivatives, you can instead focus on problems where the difficulty is figuring out how to set up that integral and derivative. Which is much harder than following some rules by rote.
That's why Feynman Diagrams were such a big deal -- they actually allowed physicists to figure out how they should be applying the equations of quantum mechanics to a specific problem. It let them figure out what to calculate. How wasn't the challenge.
The enemies of Democracy are
Because the point is to learn the math? The coursework is not designed to teach you how to use a tool, it is to teach you how the underlying pieces work.
Then they should be asking essay questions instead. Ask the student to describe how the underlying principles work.
It's ridiculous to throw a bunch of equations at the student and then say "no, you can't use the easiest and most obvious way of solving these, the method that everyone would use in the real world."
I have a Nexus 7 and found a couple free graphing calculator apps that completely eliminate any need I might have otherwise had for a full graphing calculator. I actually first started looking at apps because I wanted my old TI-83 for something but couldn't find it. Granted, students wouldn't be able to bring a fully functional Android device with them to a test, so I guess that's why TI can continue to charge the ridiculous prices they do for these things.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
The real question is why "offtopic" instead of "troll".
Does anyone really think "Does (some TI calculator) support RPN?" after 40+ years of HP using RPN and TI using standard notation could be anything but an attempt to wind up the tired postfix vs infix debate?
0 1 - just my two bits
15MHz Z80, and a 320x240 16-bit screen. Drawing to that screen has got to be slow.
Copying bytes from memory to an IO port is 24 cycles per byte on the usual code (ld a,(hl) \ out (n),a \ inc hl)
The screen itself is 153,600 bytes large.
So it takes more than 3,686,400 clocks to output an entire screen image, most likely a lot more time. This suggests the entire screen can be updated 4 times per second with unrolled code, and that's not counting the code needed to set up and get ready to output data to the screen, or generate said data. More realistically, the screen could be updated updated 3 times per second.
For things like solid color fills, probably much faster, possibly as high as 8FPS.
When did they start allowing the use of calculators during the SAT? I suppose about the same time that you could get a "perfect" score while still having some wrong or unanswered questions. OK...some Googling has shown my guess is correct, and also given me the conversions, so now I know what to tell young people if they ask what score I got.
Oblig: get off my lawn