Are graphical calculators pointless?
walkingrandomly.com
walkingrandomly.com
In return, the school pays for classroom sets of calculators, training for teachers and proprietary software and hardware that interfaces directly with the calculator for use in math and science classes. Given the number of high school math textbooks with extra sections for use with calculators and recommendations of a particular brand of calculator, it's hard to imagine that TI isn't marketing to the textbook companies as well.
With regards to education, the involved parties operate much like Oracle and the other "complete systems" vendors in the enterprise world: buy influence with the decision-makers and their subordinates, keep up the hard sell until the contract is won and then maintain the sell to ensure future business. That's not to say that the educational vendors give bad customer service, but at the same time, providing the end-users (the students) with a quality product at a reasonable price is hardly the primary concern.
Further more. I had to buy another antiquated calculator for my finance class that cost me $75.
In the modern world, I should have been able to buy each of these for about $5 as an app on my phone.
Don't get me started on the bookstore and textbooks.
That thing will last a lifetime too, they're tanks.
(I've owned a 15c for 3-4 years and have not yet replaced the batteries. My dad has replaced the batteries in his 12c about 5 times in the past 20 years.)
Seriously, though, as a student in CMU, and as a astrophysics major, I can attest to how unnecessary these calculators are. As long as it can perform trigonometry and logarithms, it satisfies the need.
I like the author's idea of using "locked-down" netbooks instead. After all, a netbook installed with Mathematica or MATLAB will be much more similar to academia/industry level calculators.
However, I also think they're way overpriced for what they are. I think a lot of the price is just 'because we can'.
It's a great deal for lazy teachers: not only do they not have to teach their students how to perform the calculation, they don't even have to teach the student how to use their calculator to do it. If a student wants to use a different model, they're on their own. They'll have to learn the TI BASIC anyways, because the textbook doesn't even try to do a decent job of describing an algorithm in any other notation.
In most cases, breaking TI's monopoly would be as difficult as, and possibly require, busting a teachers' union.
This adds big barriers to entry. You can't write your own libraries, and you can't use more powerful hardware to compensate either- TI's calculators cost them very little (the popular TI-83 uses a CPU designed in 1976), and will shove you right out of the market with their huge profit margin.
Why not just put Mathematica on a netbook? Aside from the fact that a netbook is 3-5 times larger and thus less portable, it's all about the user interface. What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys? It's probably bigger than any netbook. A graphing calculator should have a keyboard that is designed not around general-purpose text entry, but around entering math. Even the graphing calculators that have QWERTY keyboards also a dedicated number pad and a bunch of other keys.
Even though I have a full-size 109-key keyboard and a pair of monitors totaling over 4 megapixels, and I have MATLAB, Mathematica, and a bunch of other math programs installed, I still keep my HP-50g on my desk right under my monitor. It turns on instantly, has a pretty good keyboard layout, and even though the screen resolution is monochrome 131x80, it makes good use of the whole screen to display just what I'm working on. MATLAB et al are basically worthless for short computations even if you do keep them running at all times, and while they are both faster for large computations and have more features, they aren't as interactive and simpler functions are take too many keystrokes to get to when compared with my calculator. (I will occasionally actually use a 50g emulator on my desktop for some of the tasks that are a bit cumbersome without a full QWERTY keyboard, but still suck with native software.)
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Of course, the above is only why we should be continuing to use and develop graphing calculators. It has nothing to do with the current markets. (Astute readers will have guessed this based on my use of an HP calculator as an example.)
The current reality in the calculator market is that calculators are designed for and marketed to teachers who train their students to be machines that operate calculators. TI and Casio are competing to see who can better enable bad teaching methods. They do this by offering standardized platforms, fully locked-down to assuage teachers' fears about kinds of cheating that shouldn't even help on a properly designed math test, and they partner with textbook authors and publishers to integrate their model's functionality in to the "curriculum".
Nobody is designing or marketing calculators to engineers anymore, and engineers are for the most part not using handheld calculators as much as they used to. I don't think it's clear which is the cause and which is the effect. What is clear is that you can't judge the entire concept of a handheld graphing calculator based solely on the models that weren't meant to be useful. Almost anything a good calculator can do, it will do better than a general-purpose machine.
An arbitrarily-small laptop of your choice, up to and including cell phones, plus one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PAUK10U-Ultra-Mini-Keypad/dp/B0...
Not good enough? Tack a few more keys on and sell it for $30 instead. But I would be quite sure the average student would be happy to use the keypad and on-screen buttons for sin, cos, tan, e^x, and the two or three other things they actually use in school. For that matter most kids are going to be fine with the cell phone as-is, which, I might remind you, also frequently has dedicated numeric keys and enough other repurposeable keys to get you quite a ways.
(Still not enough keys? Try turning on num lock on your netbook's keyboard. Most still have them. Then bind the other keys to useful functions. It may not be optimal but with only a bit of practice it probably won't be a stopper. The keyboard is your slave, not your master.)
Yes, this won't permit very fast entry, but you and I (mmm, sweet sweet RPN) are not the norm. Go look at your average TI-82 user; IIRC, they are hunting and pecking those keyboards anyhow.
To be honest I swing the other way myself; eliminate them entirely. But at least 15 years ago when I bought my HP-48G for very similar amounts of money I was actually getting something. If we are going to be turning out these calculators, they ought to be $30, not $130.
But on the other hand, while I used to have some kind of calculator always at hand, I mostly eliminated that recently as to minimize amount of stuff I'm carrying around and use my smartphone (Python on Symbian is pretty good approximation of scientific calculator, modulo some input problems) or random REPL windows instead.
Yes, they ought to be a lot cheaper, but I think your target of $30 isn't quite realistic. Good keyboards aren't cheap, and neither are chips with power consumption low enough for running off AAAs. Certainly, if you want a high-contrast high-resolution screen and a lot of RAM, you'll be looking at a lot more than $30.
You want those things. I do not disrespect that. It sounds like you are a serious user. But you're asking students who will effectively throw these things away when they are done taking their remedial college math courses to spend $100 for those things. Why should they do that?
Also, we are talking TI, not HP; as I recall those keyboards sucked 15 years ago and I doubt they got better. Even then, the TIs felt like toys where my HP felt like a real tool.
The flexibility of an iPad's screen might be able to offset the lack of tactile feedback, but it would have to be a very well-designed piece of software. I know of no such app, though I would love to hear about one. Unfortunately, given the poor and stagnant user interfaces for both desktop applications like Mathematica and MATLAB, and TI's graphing calculators, I doubt that anyone with significant resources is doing the necessary UI research.
I don't think that tactile feedback matters all that much. The keys on the iPad screen can be much larger, that alone helps a lot. And, again, arbitrary keys offer great potential for making data entry easier.
The potential usability gains for more complicated operations might be worth it for higher-level classes (and a good port of Geometer's Sketchpad would be invaluable), but I don't think it would help for a typical homework problem set unless it also had a good way to help you typeset the solutions you computed.
Also, I tried some of the calculator iPad apps out there that utilize custom keyboards. Quite frankly, the simple fact that they have the screen space to lay out keys in a sensible way made up for the shiftiness. Contrast that with dozens of tiny keys, half of which are always unrelated to any one task. Personally, I prefer the iPad as a calculator.
Please note that this is my very personal experience as an engineer and programmer and it might not apply to you.
Is there a market for something like this?
[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/calculator/Office/1/store... [2] http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDeta...
Edit: it may also be possible to interface to an iPhone through the audio jack, and it would definitely be possible to use the IOIO (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423609) to interface with Android.
Well, I guess I think they are pointless, but I would be that teacher that doesn't let anyone use calculators at all, at least until 9th grade. Graphs are very useful in analyzing data, but then you want a real software package. But for learning math, honestly I think you get more by exercising doing lots of problems, memorizing the key facts (yes, memorizing), and drawing your own damn graphs (get off my lawn you kids!).
http://www.supware.net/android/andy-83/
No interest to declare: just a happy user :). I don't need to use a calculator very often -- when I do I am much more likely to have my phone on me than to be anywhere near a 'real' calculator.
I fell in love with RPN at my first internship, where I noticed a lot of the (mechanical) engineers used HP-12 calculators for most everything. I later bought an HP-48 and, eventually, an HP-50G. To my mind, the HP graphing calculators are the Unix of the calculator world, while TI calcs are more like Windows. Most people use TI, but the HP calculators have a longer lineage, a great if somewhat noob-unfriendly interface, and more powerful hardware (75 MHz ARM processor, 2 MB of storage/512 KB of RAM, SD card slot, and the higher-quality HP keyboard).
I haven't used my calculator in a while, but I think that's largely because I'm working with operating systems at the moment and don't need to do more than integer arithmetic. I occasionally reach for my Android phone with the HP-48 app on it, but without being able to feel the keys under my fingers it is sadly lacking.
When I do use it, it tends to be for simple arithmetic.
The problem with graphing calculators is that they're autistic. With MATLAB it's trivial to load a data file, run some calculations, generate plots, and export to PDF for use in a document. Graphing calculators are fine for working through problem sets in high school, but outside school they fall in an awkward gap between being too big and heavy to carry around and too limited for real work.
That doesn't mean that current mathematics teaching methods take that in to account. Try looking in a current middle-school or high-school math textbook. I think you'll be surprised, and disappointed.
When I was learning high-school level math, I found that the quality and usefulness of a math textbook was inversely proportional to the probability of the public schools using it (and, perhaps not too coincidentally, the colorfulness of the textbook).
In recent years, my local schools tried to get away from a rote curriculum by replacing it with a curriculum that basically eschewed teaching, instead relying on "guided discovery" or something like that. It didn't help the standardized test scores or the students' mastery of what they were supposed to learn.
My comment was meant as critical not as praise for the current system. I think it's horribly ineffective as you note