Casio Graphing Scientific Calculator Fx-9860GIII Comes with MicroPython
edu.casio.com
edu.casio.com
With that said, we really need to let calculators go- collectors can still get excited for them, but they are a waste of money at schools. You know what else can do calculations? The smartphones and computers that practically every student has access to. There may be some really poor communities where we can't assume that a student has access to a computer and it's either a $5 calculator or nothing. But other than those really poor communities, nobody spends ~$100 on a calculator without alread having access to a more powerful computer. Smartphone penetration is high even in "kind of poor" communities where most people don't own a computer. Learning Python on a calculator is less transferable than learning Python on anything else. You can get a Python environment on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, every flavor of Linux, and probably a dozen other things that I don't know about. Don't buy this calculator for any educational reason, buy it because you're the calculator equivalent of a sneakerhead.
From what I've heard this is actually happening. Classes are done with laptops and GeoGebra (or other similar thing). On some tests only basic calculator apps are allowed.
Computers and apps are not standardised at all. Disparity between them and compatibility issues are a massive contention when you have lots of people to educate. Not only that, even today here in the UK, not every student has a smartphone or a home computer so you’re instantly discriminating against them. The answer? Grab a standard calculator out of a box that everyone else has and loan it to them.
All students need a calculator for other subjects as well. In science, technology and geography they use them too.
And you can’t realistically control the configuration of a computer or smartphone in an exam.
When the TI83 was the calculator I’d actually buy 100 or so for low price at start of summer (large surplus), spend two weeks clean and refurb and then sell them again for 3x the amount at the end (high demand)
That's Great. What about every kid in Detroit, Flint, or Chicago?
Solutions need to make sure we don't widen the digital divide.
Detroit just got a donation of 51,000 chromebooks for students who's families could not afford them.
Flint, Mi issued iPads and Chromebooks to students in August.
Requiring a $120 calculator seems to be more of a digital divide issue than a $200 computer that can be used for every class.
And it was $15 the emulator app by hp was worth vs $150 for the actual calculator, and I would never use that calculator again in my life, since in real life no one is limiting my access to my computer, which does everything the HP Prime does and more. I thank my professor for that opportunity
And why should you? This isn't the 1860s when exams were being invented. We shouldn't try and copy the conditions that were accidental at the time for all eternity. If someone can cram their phone with a program that answers their exams for them they should be commended for good preparation and we should find another way of measuring peoples knowledge.
I bought a graphing calculator for A-level maths, but only needed the graphing functionality a handful of times. At university graphing calculators were banned in exams. Only the basic scientific FX-82 was allowed (which cost about £15 IIRC.)
Sure I could fire up Matlab with the Symbolic toolbox or even Derive under wine but nothing came close to just typing in what I wanted and pressing a button. I guess it's more a matter of dedicated physical buttons and muscle memory.
For rediculous things like running/writing Python on calculator here, I would like to use a real computer though.
I honestly can't understand why hasn't anybody made a TI-compatible calculator, ideally with a clean-room-implementation OSS stack.
It could probably get most of the TI market share, and be more exciting to use.
On a lighter note, they make it very easy to hack on the calculator, it's written in C++ and in a Git repo at Github.
Granted, it’s not the entire device, but it’s more than most products will give you (none). You are correct about it actually being source-available. My mistake there.
Anyway, I still use my TI-84 Plus, meanwhile virtually on my smartphone using Wabbitemu [1].
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
P.s. I would appreciate a comment on why people down-vote a message.
Not very well, for educational purposes.
The experience of calculating the inverse tan of a number and returning the result in degrees is beautiful on a Casio scientific calculator; not so on iPhone's default calculator (reverse Polish) or a Google search (awkward to execute at all).
It's distracting from the educational point whenever you have to first figure out how to do the calculation on a student's particular choice of app.
Caveat: I'd usually recommend a scientific calculator for most educational purposes, not a graphing calculator; Desmos.com is great for graphing.
I'm uncertain about learning Python on a calculator, then. There are potential educational advantages to having this on a calculator: I definitely think this is worth it for Casio to experiment with. I personally learned a lot on a programmable calculator. It's mobile and likely saves you from a difficult set up process and identifying and installing a suitable IDE that works consistently across student devices (I'd say repl.it does a good job in this space)
Phones, while more than computationally capable, aren't equally capable, have a battery life measured in hours, have access to the internet, and require software of an unknown cost and quality.
When using a phone, you can install a lot of things.
Math olympiads only allow specific models of calculators for the same reason.
I recall in high school teachers would actually go over and look through or reset your calculator if they thought you were spending too much time looking at it.
On all dutch state exams they simply checked this light on my calculator. But a friend of mine showed me already that there exsics special firmware that can fake this light so yhea 100% security will never exist.
Having said that: Once I left university I use a calculator only when doing taxes.
[2] http://www.sharp-calculators.com/en/category/6-educational-c...
On a different note, and regarding the original link: we actually were the first to introduce Python on a graphing calculator in 2017. We opted for (and contributed to) MicroPython. Three years later, all of our competitors have copied us :-)
I actually have two of these, one that is "stock" and one where I added access to the internal jtag port so that I could run my own code on it.
Well, technically we did send one calculator to Australia. It was a gift to Damien, MicroPython’s initial author!
My use case is high school students, if you have any thoughts on that.
We actually designed it with high school students in mind. We interviewed a lot of them, and we reached the conclusion that on average they were using less than 10% of the features of their calculator.
So we designed ours trying to make it as intuitive as possible. You'll notice it borrows from gaming consoles and mobile phones: that's because high schoolers already know how to use those!
As an example that might seem like a minor detail, we're the only graphing calculator on the market with anti-aliasing. It might not sound like much, but it's a lot of work to get right and that's the kind of detail we like to pay attention to.
Anyway, you can judge by yourself: our (free) simulator is just a click away: https://www.numworks.com/simulator
As a note to the HN crowd: we’re facing an intersecting UX challenge. The vast majority of our users aren’t very technical - they’re high schoolers really. But we also want to cater to a more advanced audience such as engineers.
Initially we thought it would be really hard to please everyone. But it turns out it’s actually possible to create a simple interface that still lets you do more advanced functions. And even better, designing for the “newcomers first” turned out to be a great guidance when designing our software. Judging from the feedback we get, assuming the user won’t ever read any manual or doc is actually quite a good starting point!
Also, have you seen the DM42? It's not a graphing calculator, but since similarities exist with numworks.
In the category of "all different", my all time favorite calculator is the TI-92+ which was a landscape style calculator with a qwerty keyboard. Building something like that with the 5" 800 x 480 IPS screen that STM has on the STM32F469i-Disco board would be heaven. It is on my long list of things which I will likely not get around to before I die :-). You could swap the STM32F769 for the 'F469 if you wanted more mips. I'd pay $300 for one of those, if you're wondering.
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...
This is helpful for my kid's math class.
You wouldn't buy a textbook from Texas would you? So why buy a calculator from there when there is an option from Tokyo? :-)
In most other countries, students complete university undergraduate courses, let alone high schools with only needing a cheap non-programmable calculator, while some courses like an undergraduate course in Computer Science wouldn't require any calculator at all.
Why this American exceptionalism?
The TIs instead work on the basis of functions like from a programming library. Their equivalent might be a BASH shell with pipes. That is cumbersome on the first glance but incomparably more powerful. You can chain an arbitrary amount of functions.
I once finished a 3-hour exam in 20 min since most of the questions could be translated to a like 5-lines long function-chain that took like a minute to calculate on 10 MHz but were correct in the end.
Some of it is to avoid "cheating" (not using a computer during exams, a new "exam mode" was also recently mandated, with a flashing LED). But I am not sure why calculators are still that expensive today: https://xkcd.com/768/
That, while you can buy a linux-compatible processor for a few dollars, slap python or GNU Octave on it and call it a day.
I think it's in part due to the certification process taking quite a bit of time. Even new incumbents such as https://www.numworks.com/ have relatively poor specs at a high price by today's standards.
- Disables memory access or erases it
- Disables data transmission
- Lights an indicator
- Can't be disable without physically connecting another calculator or computer. I think some even beep.
Well, of course back then I did an extensive job of using the built-in memory for my "cheat sheets", even building programs with submenus for quick access, and some automated functionality. I don't feel like it really hindered me later. At least, it taught me more about programming :)
Those things ate batteries!
If you hit them on the back the outside cover of the screen would pop off. I found drawing a graph on the back of the screen in dry wipe marker, and then popping it back in, was a hilarious trick. People would rub like mad thinking someone had drawn it in the permanent marker (I would leave a permanent marker next to it to help them get the idea).
I always messed around (or snoozed)in maths class, and still got an A. It was much later that I realised I actually had a learning difficulty...
Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.
In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.
Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.
https://www.casioeducation.com/products/calculators/graphing...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Casio-FX-9860GIII-Advanced-Graphic-...
I once considered embedding MicroPython into a (software) product myself, but was dissuaded by the number of people who didn’t like being limited to a subset of Python.
Instead I used Lua, which is much less widely-known but is small enough to embed the whole language.
It’s interesting that Casio made the opposite decision. There’s definitely a trade-off between embedding MicroPython (“it’s the language you already know, but you need to learn which bits are missing”) and Lua (“you need to learn the language, but it’s the same everywhere”).
FWIW, MicroPython, as a language, is a complete reimplementation of Python (and an amazing feat of engineering on the part of Damien and his collaborators).
But there are plenty of differences between MicroPython and CPython [0]. Many of them (listed under “Syntax”, “Core language” and “Builtin types”) relate to the language itself rather than the standard library.
Not to mention that the baseline for those lists is CPython 3.4 - MicroPython is also missing most of the new features of CPython 3.5 - 3.9.
[0] https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/genrst/index.html
Specially one like Python that introduces breaking changes even across minor versions.
Are there any differences there that you'd consider significant? They are generally quite minor and usually have workarounds. Typically a difference is only introduced when additional memory (either adding complexity to the parser or in runtime use) is the consequence of absolute compatibility. They all seem like a reasonable trade-off.
> Not to mention that the baseline for those lists is CPython 3.4 - MicroPython is also missing most of the new features of CPython 3.5 - 3.9.
The baseline was 3.4 during development but more modern features have continued to be added, particularly if they can be shown to be implemented with low memory use. For example there is solid asyncio support (based on 3.8 [0]), the assignment operator has been implemented and, care has been taken to ignore type annotations correctly. fstring support is _almost_ there too (it ought to make it in to the next release).
The development team listens to requests for new language features so please raise a ticket (or comment on an existing one [1], [2]) to help prioritise upcoming features.
[0] https://github.com/peterhinch/micropython-async/blob/master/...
[1] Python 3.5 support: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/issues/1329
[2] Python 3.6 support: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/issues/2415
But If they could add sound (with a hardware AAC codec), WiFi, SD card and HTTPS i/o with MicroPython, I would probably make it the only gadget I would carry with myself (and also use for reading, writing, listening and communicating, not just computations). This could be amazing - an all-purpose no-bullshit pocket computer with a eInk screen and without usual smartphone-related bloat.
Now I use an Android smartphone which I can't program because of the insane hardware requirements (ans also some learning curve I don't have time for) of the today mobile development toolchain. If only it could simply expose a Python with concise IO functions and a 2D array for the screen buffer...
Open symbolic solvers are great and very powerful, but they're almost too powerful. Just a clone of whatever capabilities a TI-89 has on a microcontroller would make me very exceedingly happy.
I wouldn’t use a hand held to do some Python now, but younger me used to program a window manager in Casio BASIC, so it’s not inconceivable that some kids in high school might actually use it...
Oh, the fx-CG50 is also powered by AA's, thus making it an eternal device.
That said, Casio is probably churning these things out with a BOM around $5-$10, so you can't really expect much from the display. We're spoiled by our phones, which (weirdly enough) have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android (and can't be used in class anyway).
Though maybe that’s just because nobody has come up with a great UI concept for a touchscreen calculator.
This one is better for newer models:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.emulator.f...
Yes,i know it's an emulator, but for the same price as a calculator, i get an emulated calculator + a bunch of other stuff, including wolfram alpha, huge database of knowledge online (wikipedia) + of course a phone.
...and on the other hand, i have this always in my pocket.
You are paying because you can take it with you to an exam, period
When your device has an app store or allows third party software in some other way it will never have a "single definitive good app" for anything, there will be many bad ones and a maybe a couple of good ones, for math there's this good one: https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics