Reign of the $100 graphing calculator is ending
qz.com
qz.com
A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pong was networked with two Ti-85s so each player would be on their own calc, connected using the connection cable (sold separately). Anyway, got pretty far in the game, but had to borrow my friends calc to test it. Something you should know about the connection cable and bugginess, is it sometimes caused both connected calculators to crash and reset. And I mean FULL reset with no memory.
We lost both Quadra Pong and our RPG in one tiny scary second... still crying over that one.
(truly sorry for your loss!)
I later got a TI-89, you could program this one in C. I eventually made a darts game on in, complete with a two-player mode, and a single-player mode against an 'AI' with various difficulty levels.
This is basically what made me end up in this career.
It was very slow, but it worked! I even used it for one of my calculus classes. It made very pretty graphics. I later ported the algorithm to Visual Basic just for kicks, and it ran a lot faster on a PC. In the process I learned a ton about programming and trig.
After telling all my friends that my new calculator was going to be amazing, I got it home, pulled it out of the box, turned it on, tried to add two numbers, and failed. After the sinking feeling passed, I started in to figuring out what I had determined the root-problem was: Reverse Polish Notation. A couple years of math and physics classes were then spent trying desperately to not let on to my peers or teachers that I had no idea how to do the thing that was being taught. I'd frequently spent time scouring the Internet and HP-48 menus to replicate what I'd seen in class.
But man did I love that calculator. The RPN stopped being a liability, and became an asset. And, the equation library saved my bacon on occasion.
Same deal with lisp syntax. Beginners take to Racket's parens easily, but (some) veteran programmers are dispositionally unwilling to even attempt to see the rationale beyond the learned aesthetics, even when there's so much to gain.
So it wasn't a monopoly, more like a duopoly.
On one hand, that gives you a pretty good understanding of what's actually going on. You're supposed to have that anyway, but it's easy to bumble through an assignment without a firm grasp of the mechanics if you have a lot of assistance. On the other hand, it led to the time and effort for some homework assignments being high enough that I chose not to complete them and focus on other homework.
1: A Casio in high school, TI in college.
It's so very useful for adding up columns of numbers when doing accounting and bookkeeping!
I mean, I understand why education wants these calculators, to control the students during tests. But after you leave school, why haven't calculator phone apps taken their place? Or is it because that once you leave school and you really need to do calculations, you turn to R, Matlab, or Python instead?
Also, I'm surprised nobody has quoted xkcd yet:
Edit: I know phone apps exist. I am just wondering why they don't seem to be more popular. Or are they gaining popularity I'm not seeing?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desmos-graphing-calculator/i...
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.desmos.cal...
The article probably should have mentioned that. :)
Some are: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hp.hp15c15...
But the "magic" with the TI-84 series was not the calculator itself. It was TI's excellent marketing where (nearly) every school district, plus the SAT group, were all convinced that this particular calculator was "ok" and all others were "not ok". With the end result of a guaranteed market for TI for this calculator, without having to compete with any other manufacturers. I.e., they (TI) managed to create a 'legal' monopoly by convincing the govt. agencies to only allow this one calculator in class and during tests.
Where a handheld calculator comes in handy is when doing something on paper that needs some arithmetic or trig/exp/log/roots. For that I find a physical calculator nicer than a phone calculator.
First, with the physical calculator it is easier to operate it without looking because of the physical buttons. Second, the physical calculator doesn't go to sleep as often and wakes up faster (and doesn't require authentication).
An example of a calculator that is almost perfect in my opinion is the HP-15C [1]. Note the dimensions: 128 × 79 × 15 mm (5" x 3.1" x 0.6"). This makes it small enough to work with even if you are working off on a sheet of letter-sized or A4 paper on a clipboard, or out of a spiral-bound notebook, and it easily fits in a shirt pocket.
In 2012 HP brought this back into production in a limited edition that sold for about $140. I grabbed one so that I would have two, since my original from 1982 can't last forever.
It should be possible to make a "calculator case" or "calculator overlay" for a phone that would put physical buttons for a calculator over the touch screen. There are materials that "conduct" touch. It should be possible to incorporate that into the button design so that when not pressed the touch conductive material not touching the screen, and when pressed fully it touches both the screen and the finger that is pressing the button.
Maybe even get fancy, and incorporate a small eInk display on each button to display the labels for the keys, and include an app that can change the labels to match the needs of whatever app you are using the buttons with.
I just have a hard time believe schools and teachers will allow interned connected devices on tests.
I used the same TI-81 from 7th thru 12th grade which was 6 years, but the refresh for ipads at the same district is a mere 4 years.
I can't help but notice the TI-81 was essentially kid proof and indestructible but the ipad is (intentionally) very delicate to drive sales.
Finally I think I used my TI-81 in math and science classes more hours per year than my son uses his ipad. Mostly we used the 81 to do math, mostly my son's school issued ipad is for "downtime" gaming (minecraft) and youtube watching with some casual internet surfing.
The tone of the article implies the $100 graphing calculator was a bad era, but its worth considering things have gotten much worse, not improved at all.
For a specialist who uses physical calculators all the time for serious computations, the advantages of a dedicated physical keyboard for your math probably can't be beat.
But... uhh.... who exactly does that describe nowadays? I'm sure it's non-zero; I'm also sure we're into "niche within a niche" territory here.
Which reminds me I must see if I can get a replacement battery for my old HP RPN Calculator
Phones are a better alternative in many ways, but calculators do still have their benefits.
What I want is a physical HP 48G-alike, with a more capable processor and display, and a better connector (serial/IR on the 48G I had, should be bluetooth and wifi and USB today) paired with an SD card for storage.
Also, this is HN, so of course the people occupying that niche within a niche will pop up and say "But I use a physical calculator all the time!" That doesn't make me wrong, it just means that you're here. I'd also guess, with all due respect, because I know how this sort of thing goes, that at least some of the people who might claim they have a calculator they use all the time actually use it, say, every few months. Only a few people will seriously be using them all the time.
If your working in it having a hex octal / binary conversions can be usfull
I'll add, a lot of those calculators were pretty damned hardy. It really did take an unfortunate sequence of events to kill my HP. Any one of which it probably could have survived, but the combination was just too much for it. In a lab or field environment, I like them better than a phone or computer for many operations (though definitely downsides since they haven't really kept up with generally computing power).
Prompts for exploratory learning could be presented in places other than the calculator keyboard.
Luckily there is this rather nice Android App called RealCalc which emulates the kind of caclulator I used to use at school quite well!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.nickfine...
I spent 100s of hours using that calculator so having a exact replica on my phone is very helpful.
My kids use yet another different Casio calculator which continually frustrates me with its desire to represent everything as a fraction!
The school boards should simply certify multiple devices for use in the exams.
Hardware is primitive and some enterprising company can devise a much nicer interface and probably at 1/4th price.
For one, the web app is free. They also have free iOS and Android apps that presumably work offline.
But nobody bothers, because they all know that HP can offer it at 1/4 the price, too—and less. Nobody touches HP's margins, because HP can survive on much smaller margins than any startup ever could. Why start a price war you could only lose?
Maybe one of the first applications of RISC-V should be a fully open source graphing calculator. Then anyone could build one to the same spec and they would be cheap + help open source hardware.
Not sure how that makes sense if true. Do schools actually teach classes on how to use a calculator? Is this just another way that schools are not dealing with the fact that computers exist?
A common practice before standardized exams was resetting the RAM and the Archive, and deleting Apps; some school districts even use special Apps written for the calculator to enforce that it doesn't contain unauthorized code.
Meanwhile, server-side code running somewhere else produces a clean environment for every user.
But they have to either provide fully-locked-down computers or somehow lock student computers down otherwise. That sounds hard or expensive, too.
If schools adopt chromebooks like mad, could work?
I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can.
It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons.
Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly.
As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there.
On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load.
TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.
I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year.
In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students of the future to take a test without that digital link to everyone and everything is like teaching someone to juggle, and then making them tie one hand to the opposite foot for the test.
It's ridiculous--almost like asking algorithmic questions for the whiteboard interview. No, I didn't memorize forever the big-O for eight different sorting algorithms, because I have been using Internet search engines since AltaVista, and card catalogs and textbook indexes before that. The era when someone had to become his own information library, with comprehensive index, to be good at his job has been over for a long, long time.
So I think the burden is on teachers and testers to devise new methods of testing that make instant information lookup and collaboration entirely irrelevant to the methods of student evaluation. Make "cheating" an optional feature rather than a bug. I think in the short term that means that tests will have to be time-limited and questions will have to be procedurally generated, and unique to each test-taker. And further, the questions will have to be structured such that they can't be solved by just copy-pasting them into a search box.
I recall how I programmed my TI-85 to show "Mem cleared Defaults set" before my exams. It wasn't because I wanted to cheat, but because I didn't want to lose the other programs I wrote just because some teacher didn't trust me. Obviously, someone else could have easily done the same to protect a crib sheet or answer key. When your school system mandates that every student have the same calculators, that type of cheat only becomes more common. The teachers that wrote their exams as "open textbook" never needed to worry about crib sheets. They wouldn't care if you memorized the image of the required pages, or just the page numbers, or just the index key, so long as you could get the correct answers before the end of class.
The tests I took in school are obsolete. No school should be trying to extend their lifespan by creating administrative calculator monopolies and arbitrarily blocking newer technologies. Welcome yourself to the 21st century and write better tests.
The purpose of an education is to understand the topics (language, math, science, art), not the tools (as in specific mechanical or informational aids). Making them (too) available during evaluations like exams and tests would only show that students were able to put something into Mathematica and get a result, not that they understood what they were doing.