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For Education, Why TI-83 > iPad
theodp writes "Writing in The Atlantic, Phil Nichols makes a convincing case for why educational technologies should be more like graphing calculators and less like iPads. Just messing around with TI-BASIC on a TI-83 Plus, Nichols recalls, 'helped me cultivate many of the overt and discrete habits of mind necessary for autonomous, self-directed learning.' So, with all those fancy iPads at their schools, today's kids must really be programming up a storm, right? Wrong. Nichols, who's currently pursuing a PhD in education, laments, 'The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools, but like those that came before, its ostensibly subversive shell houses a fairly conventional approach to learning. Where Texas Instruments graphing calculators include a programming framework accessible even to amateurs, writing code for an iPad is restricted to those who purchase an Apple developer account, create programs that align with Apple standards, and submit their finished products for Apple's approval prior to distribution.'"
techBASIC is an amazing BASIC programming environment available from the App Store. It has good built in libraries for graphics and interfacing with Bluetooth sensors. It also has lots of useful example programs to start from. It is fun to tinker with and I think it would be a great tool for education.
You should never seek to make yourself helpless or at the mercy of people that know more than you do.
When you have a culture in which average people believe thinking and reasoning is a terrible burden to be avoided or offloaded at every opportunity, you naturally will observe the kind of dependency and vulnerability you point out here. It leads to people who don't want to be involved in decisions that drastically affect their own lives.
Somehow there arose this myth that you either know nothing at all, or must be a fully trained expert, that no intermediate level of knowledge, no amount of reference could ever be useful.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
...The best calculator for education (IMO) is none at all. I'm not writing this as a luddite (or not entirely): I own an HP48G+ and a TI-89, and I'll admit that they are a useful means to take the gruntwork out of a lot of calculations (especially the TI-89 with its capacity for symbolic differentiation and integration).
My contention is that any calculator often tends to become a crutch that actually gets in the way of learning, in the sense that it effectively encourages the student to spit out the "answer", when the point is to understand how it is obtained.
When I studied first-year maths at Uni, most of my fellow-students never even got to grips with the fundamental theorem of calculus, which of course means that for the entirety of the course, they were parroting little mini-formulae without really understanding how it fitted together. And using any calculator to find points of inflexion on a curve is just a big time-waster when you can scribble them with a pencil much faster than you can punch the keys.
Getting back to my earlier remarks about gruntwork, though, my best choice for this - if only it existed- would be a TI-89 that does RPN (with the nice clicky keys and the big "Enter" button exactly under the index finger). Fat chance...
Holy christ, write a fucking emulator without the serial port support then.
Jesus H. Christ. There is nothing stopping you from typing in your own programs, or cutting and pasting them in, or even loading & saving them via a dropbox/icloud stores, cutting a pasting from a web page, saved text file or similar. All of which are a lot simpler than connecting two devices via a serial cable.
Number of engineering schools I've attended: 2.
Number of engineering degrees I hold: 2.
Number of TI programmable calculators I've owned in my life: 6, including 2 TI-83's.
Number of other programmable calculators I've seen other people using in my life: several hundred, easily. Perhaps thousands.
Number of times I've ever seen anybody transfer a program from one TI-8x calculator to another over the serial port: 0.