Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Quite interesting
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
If TI-83's were made by Apple, you could calculate any number except 5318008.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Give them something that will actually be useful in the real world--a netbook with octave. It's certainly a heck of alot easier to learn then TI Basic for doing anything useful.
Also you could give the python with numpy if they need a programming language that extends beyond math.
Hell, even give them mathematica (Although it wouldn't be free like octave or python..)
So, when pointed out that a cheap calculator is a much better educational deal than an expensive tablet, your answer is 'install an emulator on the expensive tablet'?
Just when I thought Apple fans couldn't sink any lower...
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
You can't run interpreted code on iStuff.
IOS SDK TOS 3.3.2
"3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any
means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other
frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in
an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)."
"The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools..."
Now get the new and improved panacea that I personally endorse. That other panacea is crap.
Sounds like someone needs to take a look at Pythonista - a full featured development environment, including code editor with syntax highlighting and code completion, interactive prompt, support for graphics and a touch interface, with full featured libraries including math and text processing; runs on iOS (iPhone and iPad) you can even export the app you've developed and have running on your iPad to Xcode so that you can build it for submission to Apple's App Store.
It's a staple on my iPad and has been for a year or so.
Sounds like a bit more useful than a graphing calculator.
rob.
Shhhh! Don't tell these guys because they don't know that-- they went ahead and wrote a BASIC interpreter for iPad in 2010 and it's now up to version 3.5.
There are also Ruby and Python interpreters available too and Pythonista is also a fully featured development environment.
rob.
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
Another "journalist" who can't be arsed to do a trivial google search to check the facts behind the thesis of his article. You can program in python, ruby, octave, or several other languages on an iPad. Even one of several variants of basic, if you want. If you really love the TI-83 you can even emulate that.
Plus read textbooks, scientific papers, manuals, etc.
Kudos to the slashdot editors and the submitter for their incredulity as well.
...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...
I teach college physics: my students use both iPads and TI calculators. But almost none of them use the programming features on either the calculator or the iPad. It's a rare student who has a creative spirit that's strong enough to bother learning to program on any device, and those that have that drive to make things will find a way to do it on any device they can get their hands on.
And while *you* might have learned to program on a TI, you're a Slashdot reader, you were that rare student. And let's be honest: as a programming interface, the TI is hideously awful.
The average student would never program their calculator.
That's some very good "No Child Left Behind" logic you've got there. Next up: the average student does not play football.
I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer—should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. -Steve Jobs
-Creates the most closed-walled operating system, and charges to program for it.
-Uses obscure and illogical languages for his walled garden's standard
-Perpetually disrespects other platforms and options which are open-source and available to 'teach people to think'.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits