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How the Outdated TI-84 Plus Still Holds a Monopoly On Classrooms
theodp (442580) writes Electronics almost universally become cheaper over time, but with essentially a monopoly on graphing calculator usage in classrooms, Texas Instruments still manages to command a premium for its TI-84 Plus. Texas Instruments released the TI-84 Plus graphing calculator in 2004. Ten years later, the base model still has 480 kilobytes of ROM and 24 kilobytes of RAM, its black-and-white screen remains 96×64 pixels, and the MSRP is still $150. "Free graphing calculator apps are available," notes Matt McFarland. "But smartphones can't be used on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. Schools are understandably reluctant to let them be used in classrooms, where students may opt to tune out in class and instead text friends or play games. So for now, overpriced hardware and all, the TI-84 family of calculators remains on top and unlikely to go anywhere." So, to paraphrase Prof. Norm Matloff, is it stupid to buy expensive TI-8x milk when the R cow is free?
The TI-8x calculators are not outdated; they do exactly what they need to do -- no more, no less. This is an important fact! If they did much more they wouldn't be allowed to be used; if they did much less they wouldn't be useful.
However, that's not an excuse for them continuing to cost $100+. There should have been an opportunity for some competitor (e.g. Casio or HP) to use 2014 technology to deliver the same capabilities with less manufacturing complexity and thus a cheaper price. Apparently, Casio is trying this, but they're not being aggressive enough: if Casio beat teachers and parents over the head with how cheap calculators should be by selling theirs for $25 or so, then IMO they'd be more successful.
IMO, a worthy "update" to a TI graphing calculator would not be more RAM or a faster CPU, it would be power envelope improvements so it could run on solar (like a 4-function calculator can) and a slimmer, lighter body. (Of course, these days I just use a TI-89 emulator on my Android cellphone instead, so I'm not the target market...)
Incidentally, the other thing I don't understand about this is why anybody picks a TI-84 when they could have a TI-86. TI-89s are prohibited for standardized tests (because they have a Computer Algebra System), but TI-86s aren't and are better than TI-84s in every other way as far as I can tell...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So, to paraphrase Prof. Norm Matloff, is it stupid to buy expensive TI-8x milk when the R cow is free?
I don't know much about cows or milk, but if we could figure out a way to teach our kids R instead of how to use a TI-8x that they'll never touch again after graduation, we would be doing them a huge service.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Forget the 86, the NSPIRE is allowed on all major standardized tests and it's worlds better than any of the 8x calcs, and the CAS model is allowed on everything but the IB and ACT (and honestly unless you can't get a decent score on the SAT or live in a state that requires the ACT for instate scholarships there's not a ton of reason to take it). It's what I bought my son, I figured why waste $150 on an ancient platform that won't help him much in his last 2 years of high school math when I could spend $125 on the black and white NSPIRE CAS and he'd be set for his entire academic career.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"They want everyone to have the same one so they only have to explain it once."
Then the schools can damn well buy the calculators for their students.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Because no smart teenager would ever find a way to fake exam mode. PKI notwithstanding, it just needs to fool a high school teacher. We hand wired fake reset switches into our HP-41CVs back when,
It's called a monopoly: the vendor sets the price.
FTFY
Or if a competitor made such a hypothetical $25 replacement for the TI-84/86, schools could just standardize on the new model. The argument for not switching to Casio, etc. right now is that younger siblings typically get their older siblings hand-me-downs, but if the replacement model was only $25, that argument would loose a lot of weight.
Although with the Ti's current tenure, they're now getting into the range where there's likely students using their grandfather's hand-me-down calculator in class. I know students were using their parent's hand-me-down Ti calculators when I was in school.... and I'm old enough now to have kids of my own in school
But then you'd need to include a Li-ion battery because those screens chew through AAs like no-one's business. Students, who basically throw the calculator in the bag after they've done their homework would forget to get it charged, would then no longer have the option of asking teacher for some spare batteries and would need to work chained to a wall-wart.
"How the outdated hammer still holds a monopoly on garages" What makes it outdated? It does everything it needs to do without being bloated. Not everything has to have a touch screen and wi-fi, you know.
I never understood why a graphical calculator is needed in school. We had them too in 10th and 11th class. It brought me pretty much nothing. Plus I was already used to RPN at the time, so I hate the TI calculators. It would have been a fail investment had I bought one. It was our luck that the things were part of the school material and not our own.
In my opinion, graphical calculators do not belongs in school classes any more than smartphones. It's really not the way to go to promote understanding of concepts, which is as important as learning concepts. The understanding part seems to be systematically ignored by the school system... and its getting worse with every modernisation of schools (at least from what I saw in two different countries where I lived).
But I doubt I'm the right person to ask; I have a rather odd view of this on this topic. I would go as far as to suggest to ban calculators from engineering schools and re-establish the use of slide rule. At least students would perhaps regain some notions of order of magnitude and intuition for it.
Never in high school was a calculator allowed on any math tests. All problems were written to be solvable without a calculator, and they were plenty challenging. And this way, the students were pretty confident when they were going astray on an answer, since most everything wound up being a whole number, basic fraction, or one of the more common irrationals. I graduated High School is 2001 from a public school as well.
Whats more important is that they taught is math, not how to use a calculator. How to use a calculator changes with the calculator, and isn't a particularly valuable skill to learn compared to the fundamentals of calculus and the other higher math. Yes, I almost never do math anymore by hand, I write a program for it, but learning all those fundamental rules about the quadratic equation, even those weird trig substitution formulas come in handy once in a while when solving a weird problem.
Calculators aren't necessary in high school mathematics, and should not be used.
Now for chemistry and physics I can't see no calculator simply because the numbers are so unwieldy most of the time, but I think there is a way to write a test that does not require a calculator.
They could use an e-paper display for even lower power consumption and better readability (higher resolution, better contrast).
There should have been an opportunity for some competitor (e.g. Casio or HP) to use 2014 technology to deliver the same capabilities
It should be noted that this is very difficult to do, because many modern math textbooks are actually built around the assumption that students are using TI-84's. I took an algebra course a couple of years ago at a local college and every example in the text actually used illustrations and instructions on how to do the graphing on a TI-84 specifically. So unless the competitor could copy the look, functionality, and layout of a TI-84 exactly (and I'm sure that would get them sued), profs and instructors would be inundated with "But how do I do that on my Casio?" questions that they aren't going to want to deal with. And so they would probably still make the TI-84 a requirement for the course, just to avoid that hassle.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
A calculator became popular because of what it could do. It remained popular because of what it couldn't.
Sounds kind of like the Apple business model, really.
I still have the HP 48G I used in college. Now my son brings it to middle school and uses it to pick up chicks.
Humans are now distributed systems, there is no value in memorizing any fact when information is available 24/7 everywhere.
Remember that the next time your surgeon needs to look something up on Google while you are coding on the operating table.
Yes there is value in knowing facts even to this day and that will never change. If any of my employees had to look up how to do their jobs constantly they would be quite useless. There is SOME information that is not worth memorizing but it doesn't follow that there is no value in memorization at all.
Did something change? I took the EIT back in the 90s and the very programmable HP-48G was allowed.
Yeah, the dinosaurs finally caught on to the fact that students were using them to cheat.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
In my university, you have one allowed calculator, and you still had to pay to get a sticker to let the exam procs know that "yes, this calculator is allowed"
I guess I understand this stuff for standardized tests somewhat, but what sort of crap is this for university exams? If your exam can be thwarted by just having a slightly more powerful graphing or programmable calculator, your exam is probably not testing very much.
When I was an undergrad, most exams in advanced science and engineering classes allowed you to bring ANYTHING as long as it didn't involve communication with people outside the room. Forget about just calculators (ANY calculator), some people would be STACKS of textbooks, and I even remember some laptops (though those were less common back then -- largescale wireless also didn't quite exist yet).
When I first had a test like this, I packed a pile of books too, along with whatever calculator I had (I think a TI-85), etc. But I quickly realized that most of this was useless. In the limited time we had, if I didn't already know the stuff, I'm not going to have time to learn it from a book.
And the tests always had complex questions designed to test your ability to confront new types of problems (and to often present symbolic answers with your work, not just some final numerical output from a calculator, nor even some symbolic answer spit out by Mathematica, even if you had a laptop), so even if you had somehow programmed your calculator to output a numerical answer and handle every problem you had encountered in the class so far, you'd still have to have some pretty serious critical thinking skills to do well.
If the only thing standing between you and an A on exams is having a "non-stickered" slightly more "advanced" piece of crap calculator built on 20-year-old technology to do your exams with, that course is probably not asking very much of its students.
As strange as it sounds, the TI-84 is a newer model than the TI-86.
Basically, the lines went like this:
TI-82 -> TI-83 -> TI-84 Plus -> TI-84 Plus Color
TI-85 -> TI-86
Since it's not obvious on that list, the 82 and 85 came out around the same time, as did the 83 and 86.
Incidentally, it's important to note that the stats listed in the summary are for the black and white version and not the newer color version and yet it's the color version's MSRP they're listing.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Then the schools can damn well buy the calculators for their students.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
IMHO, one of the big problems with "$technology_items for every student" is that parents incorrectly look at this as a windfall entitlement -- free stuff for their kids that they don't have to buy themselves, when that's more or less exactly what's happening -- the district taxes the property owners and the taxes buy the stuff. TANSTAAFL.
In some ways, though, there is a free lunch component because schools are usually funded by property taxes which includes many properties without kids, shifting the burden of goodies for kids to people without kids.
Because school districts taxing property owners and buying calculators is so much more efficient than students obtaining their own calculators with that same money.
Who said the students would keep the calculators? The only situation where you MUST HAVE THIS SPECIFIC CALCULATOR is in the classroom. Keep the calculator there! The special calculator stays where people find it worthwhile, everywhere else the rest of us can use a computer like a normal person.
If you're actually going in to a field where having a fancy calculator is useful versus a smartphone you can buy it yourself then. Most of us have absolutely no need for these things beyond the few tests for which they're required.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Free: m48
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
$10.99: m48+
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
Free: i48
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
I wonder if the TI-84 is enough of a standard that an argument could be made that copying is necessary for the sake of interoperability?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ten years later, the base model still has 480 kilobytes of ROM and 24 kilobytes of RAM, its black-and-white screen remains 96x64 pixels, and the MSRP is still $150
I really hate it when people pass off misinformation.
As tempting as it is to call the black and white version the base model, it doesn't appear to be manufactured any longer.
Which means that the current base model is the version that has with 3.5 megabytes ROM and 21 kilobytes RAM, with a color screen that is 320x240 screen. The calculator also has a rechargeable battery (type unknown) and an MSRP of $140.
You can find this information (except the MSRP) on this chart.
Incidentally, Amazon US currently sells the color LCD model (black) for $104. Other colors seems to cost more.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Entering the numbers into the calculator and pressing enter isn't a complex task, there is no need for that to be part of the test.
It's not quite as trivial as that. I have engineering students in college who use the "10^x" button for scientific notation instead of "EE" (or whatever it's called on your calculator), and so when asked to calculate 4/(2e3) will end up with 2000 instead of 0.002 (because they type 4 / 2 x 10^3).
While your highbrow insult of the poster above is likely baseless generalization, the "Google has allowed stupid people to X" is interesting concept. In my opinion, this is overwhelmingly positive societal benefit. If mediocre people can be more productive, then society as a whole can be more productive. It doesn't matter how smart is the person that solved the problem, all that matters is that the problem is solved.
That also addresses another concern, about people bringing in unapproved data preprogrammed in the calculators. If the calculators are provided, this isn't an issue.
Note that when I was in school, this is precisely how graphing calculators were handled. The school had a box of TI-81s shared amongst a few classrooms.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Get a 48GX. It's basically the same as the SX but notably faster.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
that word. you keep using it.
i don't think it means what you think it means.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
False. Speed. Everything I've been taught is in a book somewhere. You absolutely cannot take someone of equivalent intelligence, hand them a big stack of books, and expect them to perform anywhere near as well. You can't expect them to perform AT ALL. If you think this, you've never been in that situation. My workplace is filled with smart people with advanced degrees. It is laughable to think that the expert software developer can just switch seats with the expert CFD person. They're both intelligent, one just has a wealth of knowledge to draw on that isn't matched by a stack of books on advanced math and physics.
Basically, your method tests whether people are able to teach themselves physics on demand, not if they've actually learned physics.
Since HP basically got out of the calculator business, the HP 50G, which in my opinion is a better calculator anyway, has been available to the public in software form for free. It uses the actual ROM code from the 50G, which HP donated to the public domain.
You have to look around a bit, but versions are available for Mac, PC, and Linux.
Unlike the TI models, straight math can be entered in algebraic or RPN mode, and formulas can also use the "formula writer".
I've always like TI, and I have nothing against them, but over the years, having used various TI and comparable HP models, I've invariably thought the HP was superior.
So a school requires attendance by force of law, requires parents to use a specific make and model of product, and you think that constitutes a free market for setting the price?
From Wikipedia:
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. Monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service and a lack of viable substitute goods."
Also from Wikipedia:
"Monopolies derive their market power from barriers to entry -- circumstances that prevent or greatly impede a potential competitor's ability to compete in a market."
Please enlighten us with your definition of a monopoly and why it isn't applicable to this situation.
Didn't necessarily say it was used for cheating. Maybe I just didn't want to lose all the rest of my data and the video games I'd written? There wasn't exactly an easy way to back up your calculator data unless you had a special cable and a computer, and this was 1994-1995. My family didn't have a PC then.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
http://xkcd.com/768/
If you enter e^(Pi*i), does it spit out -1?
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't have time to verify all your fancy equations so I'll just agree.
You obviously don'y have kids in school. My school district is sending down all kinds of these ridiculous edicts for purchases. We are having to buy all kinds of shit to be collected by the teachers and provided to the classroom at their discretion. On my kids' 8th grade school supply list this year, besides the TI calculator:
A home computer
A Printer
Computer paper
Internet Access
Microsoft Office
My daughter is using my old Casio FX-4000P that I used in high school. Her teacher said, "I won't be able to explain how to use that." My daughter replied, "I don't need you to because it's so easy."
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Same here, many engineering classes I had were open book, but a few profs had closed books and some didn't even allow calculators.
I had one excellent engineering prof who allowed one page of notes to exams, but no calculator. Most of the questions were asked in a way such that there was little to no numeric computation required, and when he did request a numeric answer it was simple stuff that he expected us to be able to simply and quickly do in our head or on paper. His philosophy was that you need to understand the problem well enough and break it down to analyzable pieces sometimes with approximations so that you can get within ~5% of the correct numeric answer by hand analysis, and if higher accuracy is required it will generally be optimized on the computer with software you bought or wrote.
The homework problems would cover more rigorous computations and computer simulations, the tests were designed to see if you truly understood the problems at hand.
My calculus teachers didn't allow us to use calculators when I was in college. I felt like I understood the math better this way. He picked problems that were not hard to do without calculators. Unless the goal is to teach kids to use the calculators themselves, why are they needed?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I should clarify:
It is the "50g mode" from the Emu48 project. The authors claim that it is authentic ROM, they thank HP for donating it to the project, and I have yet to find that it does anything differently from what is described in the 50G user's manual. And I've definitely been putting it through its paces. I don't claim to have tried everything in its repertoire... I haven't had need for literally everything it's got, and that would take a long time anyway.
Two issues with the $25 graphing calculator are build quality and software.
While it doesn't have exactly state-of-the-art electronics in it, the TI-84 is a beast. It holds up to the abuse most students put it through. If you made a $25 one, it would probably be built like a cheap Android phone. Those don't last nearly as long as a TI calculator, even if cared for really well.
As for software, I've seen plenty of graphing calculator phone apps, but none of them can hold a candle to a TI calculator. Color and the higher res screen are both nice, but they simply don't support the quantity of functions or programmability of the TI calculators. Someone else suggested R, which has a different problem: It can do all the things, but it's far more complex to pick up and use than a TI calculator.
There's a reason the graphing calculator app on my phone is a TI-89 emulator.