Slashdot Mirror
The Reign of the $100 Graphing Calculator Required By Every US Math Class Is Finally Ending (engadget.com)
If you took a math class at some point in the US, there is likely a bulky $100 calculator gathering dust somewhere in your closet. Fast forward to today, and the Texas Instruments 84 -- or the TI 84-Plus, or the TI-89 or any of the other even more expensive hardware variants -- is quickly losing relevance. Engadget adds: Thanks to a new deal, they'll soon get a free option. Starting this spring, pupils in 14 US states will be able to use the TI-like Desmos online calculator during standardized testing run by the Smarter Balanced consortium. "We think students shouldn't have to buy this old, underpowered device anymore," Desmos CEO Eli Luberoff said. The Desmos calculator will be embedded directly into the assessments, meaning students will have access during tests with no need for an external device. It'll also be available to students in grades 6 through 8 and high school throughout the year. The calculator is free to use, and the company makes money by charging organizations to use it, according to Bloomberg.
I don't think I've actually ever used a graphing calculator, but I do *require* one that uses RPN, which pretty much means HP...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The calculator is free to use, and the company makes money by charging organizations to use it, according to Bloomberg.
Sounds like it is not free to me.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Meh! Graphing Calculator we used (think it was an HP) allowed for programming on it. So we played games on it during class.
Then when it was time for exams, we wrote the formulas we were supposed to memorise into programs on the calculator.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They've had a good run of doing nothing and not updating their hardware or software in any kind of meaningful way for the past couple decades. No other company would have been so neglectful to such a profitable product line.
A couple of decades ago it almost made sense, but now that every student has a more powerful device in their pocket already, it's ridiculous that they've been forced to shell out so much money for such an antiquated device.
It may be free for personal use, but in a commercial or educational environment it may require a license,
That's really all there is to say about this.
I'm waiting for a kid to get expelled for bringing in his grandfather's real slide rule because the slide rule is an unauthorized "cheating device" not covered by a school board approved EULA.
You don't need more than a $10, simple, scientific calculator, it will have all the features you need. Instead of giving kids a tool that prevents them from learning the concepts, why not have them learn the concepts and provide them a simple tool to help them along the way.
When I took calculus, advanced calculus, and vector calculus, we weren't allowed to have a calculator in the classroom or exams, because once you got the equation you needed, in the right form, the answer didn't matter. This is how every child should learn math.
Even in engineering school, I don't remember actually needing my calculator for very much, besides crunching a final answer, which was a very small amount of the overall work.
It's free like Free Software but not Open-source Software.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Free to the student. Anyway sounds kind of dumb, there's plenty of free software out there to replicate a calculator.
More government boondoggles to grab as much taxpayer cash as possible.
The kids won't be any smarter, but someone got rich.
So buying up all those calculators at rummage sales isn't going to pay for my retirement after all? Damnit!
https://xkcd.com/768/
The Fundamentals of Engineering known as FE or EIT only allows the use of calculators like the Casio FX-115 or such. They are $15 to $20 each, brand new, and can be found at yard sales or goodwill often for $1-$5 each.
The $100 calculator for high school is a joke, much like modern high-school education is a joke. There is no place where such a calculator as the HP-48G gets even the mildest of workouts.
This means this marketing piece by Desmos is just that. It isn't going to change the purchasing habits of teens who have to show off, because "keeping up with the joneses" is the stunning norm (and indication of huge educational failure) of American high-school in the same way the housing price-value gap in Chandler AZ was an indicator of the real-estate bubble.
Desmos is selling to the institutions who buy apple laptops for their students instead of chrome-books, and not delivering a value the student are looking to find. Kids who use the free option, much like those whose only meal is the government provided lunch, will be ostracized and scourged for being poor in an American school; for being poor and hoping to be able to do anything about it with education.
I'm from Ontario. Like text books they provided everyone with a TI-84 in my math class, but you didn't get to keep it at the end of the semester.
I bought a TI-85 for myself back then. Used it through High school, University, still use it today.
and so now the network / internet need to be up for the test??
If it drops will they add time even if they need to keep kids late?
Will an network drop force you to start over?
Will kids put down fun still like 404 error on there test?
Really? Why a calculator? No problems in math apart from specialized areas should require a calculator.
unlimted student loans drive this as well as textbooks that get changed all the time with little real change but with lot's of profit / and kick backs to schools.
It said not required for the standardized testing. It didn't say it wouldn't be required in class anymore.
How is this phone app embedded into standardized testing, which I assume is done on normal computers without touchscreens? Using a calculator is clunky without a touchscreen - typing numbers using the keyboard may be easy, but clicking on other buttons (or memorizing keyboard shortcuts) sounds like it'll slow them down.
Based on your UID (plus I know you've been hanging around these parts for a long while) I would wager you are not a student in a US math class.
Wow. Just WOW!
Well, certainly I have been a math student, and its possible my children, who possibly vet their education expenses through me could be math students. It's even possible I'm in a MS or PhD program...
And whoop-de-do to you! If you want, you can use a graphing calculator, but just as an analogy, I learned to drive on a stick, and I can drive anything.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So now they can watch you actually push the buttons on the calculator in real time.
I am sure this will be mined for scientific research about how students
solve particular wordings of problems in a testing environment.
It will also be used for R&D purposes by the SaaS company,
and ultimately for marketing purposes.
The information will not be adequately protected.
And most importantly, the human subjects have not really given informed consent.
Which makes me wonder what other information is already being collected.
Bob took 4:39 to solve problem number 117, and here was his approach.
Bob is therefore highly qualified for problem categories 114-A and 96-Y,
but performs poorly along the 191 axis of all problems with time limit G.
If the problem involves "donuts" his performance goes up by 0.3 %.
You always knew this would be on your Permanent Record,
don't say you weren't warned.
You asked hp to resume producing the 30b for the wp34s, I suppose? Or looked into swissmicros?
Me, I don't actually need any calculators, I just find them handy to have around. A ti30 (solar, while at it) will do nicely though currently there's a hp48g and a hp48sx residing next to the desktop, and a ti89 in storage along with a few ti30 and like models. And a few slide rules too.
On another note, I question why children would need a graphing calculator at all.
Back in the day we'd quickly sketch a graph by hand, and it still is a good skill to have even though I rarely do any longer. Just like the ability to write quickly is, to the point I'm re-teaching myself handwriting since my lower school teachers botched it so hard 30 years ago. I did learn math using a (ti, obviously) scientific calculator but I sort-of miss never having learned to use a slide rule in school, since it does provide unique insights that automagic all-singing all-dancing do-the-math-for-me devices just don't.
In a sense, going the graphing calculator way is an admission of failure to really teach math. At all, in an engaging way, such that it sticks and the children can independently apply it to any and all problems even if they've never seen a close like example before, and do it all correctly too.
Which is not to say nobody should use calculators, ever. Just teach without until the children could get by without, only then add fuel to the math fire. In that way, teaching and building a fire are alike, but the best and brightest math minds aren't burning very brightly right out of highschool if they let the system have anything to do with it.
...If you took a math class at some point in the US, there is likely a bulky $100 calculator gathering dust somewhere in your closet. ...
Though I do also still have the HP-35 calculator that replaced my slide rule.
What more power could you want for a device that instantly spits out the answer you give it? The TI calculators aren't underpowered in the slightest, they are simply over priced.
As for "bulky" the vast majority of the size is made up of lovely big and easy to use buttons. I don't think any device would be better served with a context menu and a touchscreen or god forbid endless amounts of whitespace with every useful function buried somewhere 4 menus deep without context of where in in the system you currently are.
http://ncees.org/exams/calculator/
The most and least powerful calculators any student should need. I bought two TI-30XA for the PE exam and use them daily in my work doing machine design.
Real math majors used HP-28S calculators.
Brilliant piece of gear. Still works flawlessly nearly 30 years later. And of course, the best feature was RPN.
So take your Ti toys away, I've got real work to do.
(/h)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I made it a game to see how many programs I could stuff onto my TI 84 plus that I bought on ebay for $50. Between all of the physics programs, math helpers, and the fake "memory clear" application those darn TIs made high school and parts of college a breeze. Work smarter, not harder.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your kid's just lying to you about the price of the required calculator for the class so he can skim $100 and impress that girl he likes with a hot air balloon ride.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Neat.
Call it a "graphene" calculator and 100$ will be a bargain. Oh, is "graphene" still a buzzword in 2017? I know 3D printing died years ago. Is it AI or VR these days?
We use it at the US Air Force Academy. It's completely free. However, if you want them to customize it, then pay. For example, it won't plot slope fields natively. If you want that, either figure it out, or pay them to add it.
The Desmos calculator will be embedded directly into the assessments, meaning students will have access during tests with no need for an external device.
Back when I was in school, tests were done on paper, written with pencil. Is that no longer the case? The reason I ask is: partial credit. If a student did a good job, showing their work, but ultimately got the wrong answer, a teacher could still give credit for the portions that were correct. Is that sort of thing possible on modern tests? (Unfortunately, the article doesn't describe how they work - it just assumes I already know.)
Hokey religions and ancient calculators are no match for a good smartphone at your side.
Not hotdog.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It is now common practice to do a full memory reset just before any standardized examination.
I'm wondering :
Nowadays with extremely powerful (relatively to calculators) CPUs available in very small form factors -
has anyone attempted to built one (say a RaspPi Zero) inside a calculator sell,
programmed to mimick the "exam mode memory reset" in a believable way, but then unleash all its potential to the end user (full blown programmability, ability to use modern math language like R, Octave, Maxima, etc. Scripting with Python/Perl)?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm just feeling nostalgic... I knew a little about programming when I was in school, so I wrote tons of programs on my TI calculator. Basically, in every lesson, when I learned a new math concept, I'd write a little program that could do most of the work for me. This meant that I was learning both math and programming. Naturally, I'd tend to forget a lot of those math concepts after I'd finished writing the program, but that pretty much describes my day job now.
I still use my TI-85, twenty years later. Sure, it's antiquated at this point, but by now I've just gotten so used to the layout and functions that I don't know what I'm going to do when it finally goes.
There's a TI-81 around here somewhere also; that one I don't use any more.
... after all, what could possibly go wrong?
A couple of decades ago it almost made sense, but now that every student has a more powerful device in their pocket already, it's ridiculous that they've been forced to shell out so much money for such an antiquated device.
Maybe there is a good reason for requiring a dedicated calculator for an exam, rather than an an app on a communications device that would also allow basically unlimited cribbing from the net, and perhaps real-time coaching through online chat, text, or other digital medium from an accomplice to boot.
Now cue the "exams are antiquated" nonsense, since clearly in this "post-truth" world, critical thinking and even education itself appears to be considered "antiquated," along with all kinds of other "dated" notions like human rights, civil liberties, freedom of association, and democracy.
It is neither free, nor open source. It is proprietary.
...the Desmos and Smarter Balanced consortium's deal negates that concern by embedding the calculator directly into the test, cutting off any outside access.
Please look up the definition of Free Software.
Never had one, I used an HP-48 in college. And IIRC at the time TI calculators didn't support double precision, so if you used one in certain physics classes, you were fucked.
There is not much substitute for the ease of entering in equations the way you see them written in books than the TI line of calculators.
Rather than schools spending $100 to get a physical device that will last decades, they've been roped in by Pearson's (of course) to a subscription model.
So now instead of having a small dedicated device that's exceptional at doing math and will last 20-30 years, you get to have a bulky laptop and internet connection and subscription.
Which somehow is cheaper for schools than buying TI calculators.
TI doesn't upgrade the calculators much because again, they're intended to last decades. They're not in the business of making things obsolete like textbook companies such as Pearson.
Maybe if Pearson could make a decent textbook that doesn't need yearly updates, schools could afford proper tools for their students.
Work Safe Porn
I'm surprised they're just now replacing the calculators in high schools. I graduated close to twenty years ago, and had a TI-85 and later a TI-89. It made sense back then, because not everybody even had a computer at home. Nowadays you can get a computer for less than the calculator costs, and all the kids have smartphones anyway. The only worry now is preventing students from using a program that is too smart and which does all the work for them.
Does bring back memories. I remember taking apart my TI-85 and taking out a certain resistor, which sped the calculator up a lot. Pretty stupid thing to do actually - I definitely wouldn't have attempted it if I had bought the calculator myself instead of having it come from my parents. My friend wasn't so lucky with the process and ended up bricking his. I did some of my first ever programming in TI-BASIC. Automating calculations for chemistry and physics classes, I think. Fun times.
It's sounds like a lot of dosh for something they'll use once, but why don't they sell them on to the next cohort after the exam?
You could plot the price progression on the calculator.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We were only required to get a TI-36x solar model. Those are far cheaper and extremely capable. They're also approved for use on the SAT and ACTs. Any graphing calculator was replaced by us having to draw the graph ourselves, which is how most math classes work from what I've heard.
Rocket Scientist here. HP-55c got me through school for every test.
Of course, we used computers extensively, but not during tests. Once wrote a little CFD program (Computational Fluid Dynamics) that sucked up 3 days of mainframe CPU time before someone killed it. The prof called me into his office. Rather than complain, he provided me with a login to the Cray. 12 minutes of runtime and I had my answers. ;)
After graduation, I was off to NASA for work.
I think I prefer my TI-89 Platinum and my HP-50G. At least they do not try to second guess me and ask if I truly want to close the page when I shut them off. Now if Maplesoft was allowed, it would be something to crow about.
this will take a while to matter or implement.
during tests the you can not bring a phone/smart nor a laptop even if math tests are computerized it would be inconvenient to switch to a nother page to use the calc though they could do split screen or dual monitor or e special screen just for calc. these things seem a bit bulky for such things.
I don't see how a calculator with no physical buttons is superior to one that is a tactile object, and as the calculator is "embedded" into the test itself, that means switching back and forth between the two apps. This is a bad kludge that sounds painful to use.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
all the articles I've read have been short on details. How exactly do you do a graphing calc app without making it open to cheating? There's tons of these apps on the various app stores.
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there's better calcs than the 84. Kids pick it because if you get stuck your teacher knows how to work it. Assuming this takes off it'll become the standard for the same reason.
Math teachers aren't necessarily good with gadgets and computers. Teaching is an entirely different skill set.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Physical keys
Hell it's about time. $100 given today's technology, and capabilities could buy a whole class these things.
A great little way to learn programming in Middle School.
So once they graduate, switch schools (that'll really suck if you switch the year of the exams), or enter a business they'll need to buy a subscription in order to continue doing math.
The schools are more concerned about ensuring all children have access to the same technology regardless of income. It's not about smarter kids, it's about fairness in testing. And paying licenses ensures you get support, that could well save schools money compared to what they'd need to do to have embedded open-source calculators in their tests, which would require them to hire IT guys to set that up and maintain it.
Wait long enough and start-ups like Desmos will be gone. But my TI-85 still works and I still have my data from when I was in high school, ... 20 years ago.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I never understood why anyone used TI calculators. I watched my engineering colleuges struggle with algebraic notation time after time, while RPN was easier and faster. And why would a professor care which machine one used? I still have my HP-41, as well as an HP-50, plus HP programs on my tablet and smartphone.
It makes sense to have a graphing calculator. Heck it even makes a sort of sense for it to be not so powerful but it doesn't need to be that over priced. It's probably the single most over priced item I own. This calculator app is nice but it's no replacement for a physical calculator for many reasons. I would buy another TI-89 right now if it wasn't a machine worth about $25 dollars costing nearly $100.
Just another second banana
A monopoly is a monopoly, and will result in poor pricing at best, price fixing and gouging at worst. This should go without saying, but since we are all here, it apparently does not. The system fostered a monopoly, which fostered product stagnation and enabled a 20 year long price fix. There are a thousand tools to do this job, but the testing company allowed 1. (or a few, but you get the point) This allowed the calculator company to freeze prices amid a rapidly falling market, because they had a mandated customer base. To replace the calculator, we have a computer calculator, which will be again mandated, and charged per click. (or customer, or week, or year). We've have very carefully, eliminated the middle man, while replacing him with the middler man. This too should go without saying, but since we are all here, it for obvious reasons does not. The irony, is that this reasoning comes from groups testing the reasoning of our children.
Or use any of the multitude of free math programs that do the same shit and much more instead of something deliberately crippled for educational use.
If it takes you more than 15 minutes to get going with a new calculator you probably aren't working in a job that requires a lot of math anyway.
And how will kids use the calculator outside of the test? Do they need smartphones or computers now to do homework?
I also prefer a calculator with physical buttons. That said, I just downloaded the desmos app for my smartphone, as it's much better than the scientific calculator app that I had installed previously.
That was my thought as well. Because the cost WILL be passed on to the student.
It could even be more expensive than a physical calculator after the schools markup for the cost of the service.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sadly, the era of hobbyists hacking their calculators to do cool stuff has been mostly dead for a long time. The TI-81 didn't have a link port, so hacking wasn't considered an option. However, TI decided it would be a good idea to put link ports on their calculators to send programs and data. This included the ability to do a complete backup of the calculator's RAM, which could be sent to a computer. The TI-85 had a "custom" menu that users could use for storing frequently used built-in commands. The custom menu was implemented as pointers to memory locations, and the custom menu was included in the backup. The RAM backup could be modified so that entries in the custom menu would point to string variables stored at fixed locations within the backup. The string variable could then contain arbitrary z80 instructions, which would then be executed when that entry in the custom menu was selected. Hobbyists then created RAM backups where the first entry in the custom menu contained a pointer to a string variable, which was a launcher for other programs stored in string variables. That's how ZShell was born.
Later calculators were hacked and eventually started shipping with functionality for assembly language programming. TI-BASIC was great, but assembly language programs were much faster and had access to functionality that wasn't implemented in TI-BASIC. Programming in TI-BASIC was quite easy and even assembly language programming was simple enough that it wasn't that difficult to learn. Later on, TI-GCC was created to compile programs for some of the 68k calculators.
Lots of people talk about the need to interest kids in STEM fields. I played a lot of games on my calculators in class, but I also wanted to learn how to create games. I learned a lot about programming because I wanted to be create games. TI calculators were actually a really good platform on which to learn how to do this. I was far from the only person who shared this interest and wanted to create games. An online calculator almost certainly won't have this functionality, and that's a shame.
IN 1968 slide rules were allowed in my high trig class. Electronic calculators were so new (and expensive) that when a student showed up with we all gathered around and oohed and awed. They were banned taking the SAT.
Since when is solving Calculus equations for you in three dimensions "underpowered?" I think the teachers are starting to be young enough to know a little BASIC goes a long way and can't monitor appropriately for cheating. I'd make my students use a slide rule. ;)
Got a "B" in it.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Students certainly deserve a cheaper variant, but the relatively simple environment for learning Assembly has become rare or complicated these days (there was something to be said for 640kb do-what-you-want RAM). It's too bad more schools weren't setup to take advantage.
and so now the network / internet need to be up for the test??
Yes - they are selling an online testing service with the embedded calculator app.
You haven't been in school for a while have you? A lot of tests are done online already.
There should be a version of MathCad for Ipads and the like. Around since about 1985, completely WYSIWYG, and incorporating calculations, graphs, text areas, etc.; and embeded Windows-compatible objects from other applications. Most of all, one can store pages and make topic-specific page templates (e.g., for physics). These calculators came out in the last year of the Apollo program, which I was working on, and they were great then, but obsolete as soon as MathCad became available. Efficiency, discipline and legacy all available in one venue. The academic version is worth every penny if you are going to be any sort of STEM major, and will last you right through graduate school. There is a pretty good freeware clone called SMath Studio available on the web. Any version of StudyWorks from Amazon is nearly as useful, the limitation being that you can't build complex procedures ("programming"), which is almost never required in most lower-level courses.
On Android, I've been pretty satisfied with RealCalc [google.com] as an RPN calculator (no graphing though).
Unfortunately, Android devices tend to have wireless communication built it which makes them extremely unsuitable for exams. The better solution for all this though is to simply not allow any sort of graphing calculator whatsoever. School kids should know how to plot the basic functions like parabolas, cubics, hyperbolics, straight lines etc. without a calculator doing it for them. You can then replace the $100+ graphing calculator with a $10+ basic scientific one AND improve the standard of education at the same time.
I bought myself two Casio scientific calculators (one graphing, one not) for my math classes. Nice calculators.
Stringing together IF/THAN statements mixed with equations to create simple games on the TI in Jr High was my first brush with programming for fun.
TI-89 emulator for smartphones = free.
If you took a math class at some point in the US, there is likely a bulky $100 calculator gathering dust somewhere in your closet.
Back when I was in school, you were expected to know how to do this stuff yourself, and you pretty much weren't allowed crutches like calculators. Including in college.
Of course, everyone's all "Wah wah, why do we have to learn to do things that computers can easily do for us?" Well, for one, because you only get answers to questions you know how to ask. If you don't understand the math, you aren't going to be able to phrase the question, and, unfortunately, the vast majority of interesting questions weren't created by a professor trying to avoid flunking all of their students. If all you know how to do is enter the questions into the computing device, then you are an easily-replaced commodity.
Basically, by the time you're done figuring out the question to ask, I've already discarded that line of reasoning, and the next one, and the next one. Your competition isn't going to wait for you to apply your device, they're just going to move on without you.
Don't they teach the sketching of curves, identification of axis crossing and inflexion point, etc as part of basic maths any more?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I used to write important formulae in pencil between the keys. Good thing I graduated before they took that away.