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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.
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.
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,
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...
On Android, I've been pretty satisfied with RealCalc as an RPN calculator (no graphing though). I used to use some HP-48 emulator, but found RealCalc easier to use on my phone. I lost my real HP-48 in a move once... it may still be packed away in a box somewhere. My venerable HP-15C was stolen from my car years ago, I've been tempted to buy a new used one, but $200+ is a lot to spend on a something I use so rarely.
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
https://xkcd.com/768/
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?
It is now common practice to do a full memory reset just before any standardized examination.
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.
Then when it was time for exams, we wrote the formulas we were supposed to memorise into programs on the calculator.
Same. Gave me my most valuable lesson in programming. I made a helper program on my calculator and distributed it to a few friends who distributed it to their friends, and so on. The program had a few options (depending on what was being asked, how the question was worded, etc.), prompted the user for the 'givens', and printed the result neatly in the center of the screen. Being young and naive, I simply wrote the result to the screen with an offset, then wrote a few blank spaces over the ten-thousandths and hundred-thousandths spot to make the result appear centered.
The exam question asked for the answer to be rounded to the thousandths place, and guess what? The thousandths place had to be rounded up, which of course no-one knew because the display simply truncated the result without rounding.
Whole class got that question wrong except me (spent so long making the program that muscle memory meant it was quicker for me to do the math manually).
Lesson learned: if you want people to stop bugging you for stuff, give them wrong information. No-one asked to use my programs in that class ever again!
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.
Which is why the TI-85 was better than the TI-81. You could fake the reset screen perfectly.
a hot air balloon ride.
Is that a euphemism? It's so hard to keep up with the lingo...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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 ]
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.
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I still have the physics/chemistry one, it's got corrections pasted in it because they redetermined the densities of phlogiston & aether.
There was a maths one too. Maybe it's at my mom's place. I'll pop upstairs and look.
While it's nice to have the book the teacher emphasised that if you need to look up Sin^2 + Cos^2 you're penalising yourself timewise, and I agree. Your brain is the fastest cache there is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You had it lucky. I turned up to an exam one Friday and they said "you can't use that one, it's Tuesday's model."
Thank $deity for my trusty log tables & slide rule! But you tell that to kids today...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I hope it only did that if you passed the -v option!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We had to do graphs by hand - graphing calculators were explicitly banned. Generally they were easy questions. Find the roots & find f(0) - you know where it crosses the axes. Diff=0 for the minima/maxima. Double diff=0 for the inflection points. I forget now how you find the asymptotes. Disembowel a goat, maybe.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The ability to use a calculator to get an answer to a math problem is math knowledge. It might not be the math knowledge necessery to get an answer if you don't have a calculator. But it is math knowledge nevertheless.
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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Physical keys
UID pissing session? I'm there
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
Nonetheless, the ability to use a hammer to drive a nail is not physics knowledge. It's carpentry knowledge.
The ability to use a calculator to get an answer is not math knowledge. It's not even arithmetic knowledge. And, unlike using a hammer, it's so trivial to learn that it counts for nothing at all.