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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

TI is pretty clearly just coasting on being the one mandated by a lot of schools; there's no way you can justify them still costing like $100 and having the same capabilities as when I was in high school.

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I searched for graphing calculator apps on iOS the other day and found a ton that simply attempt to recreate the TI-84, e.g. [1].

So anyone with high school kids: are they still buying $100 physical calculators? Or are they just using free/cheap apps?

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graphing-calculator-x84/id1247...

I'm a few years out of high school, but during my time anything other than physical calculators were explicitly banned due to the potential for kids to be accessing the internet during exams. I even had a friend who won one of TI's higher end calculators at a math competition, only for him to be banned to use it during exams because of its higher capabilities. Perhaps things have changed in the post-Covid world.

In my high school physics and math classes, we were allowed to run any programs that we programmed ourselves. This was on Ti-84s so BASIC not Python.

Given the context, it made a lot of sense.

Yeah about the same here. I wrote some programs to handle quadratic formulas. Impressed the Algebra teacher who then let me take AP Computer Science so I can learn to program in Java...which I promptly forgot after graduating HS.

When I was in HS, at the exams we were expected to use our TI-84+ calculators, but we were not allowed to have any programs of our own, so they made us clear the programs before they handed out the problems.

Which you could work around by archiving and then unarchiving the programs. I remember having to do a soft factory reset for one class before exams, rather than just clearing programs. At least they took the policy to its logical extension

Just graduated secondary school in April. Just as a someone said in a reply below, anything other than a physical calculator is still banned during assessments. There are tools like Desmos, GeoGebra, etc... that may be used by the instructor and students during lessons though. Although it's strange, there is no explicit rule provided by our Mathematics faculty that bans higher functioning calculators I've only seen one person carrying one.

There's no way they let you take the SAT with your phone out. Acceptable calculators are actually enumerated though there's more than I realized. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...

I'm really surprised that the open source NumWorks calculator is on that list! Also the RadioShack / Casio EC-4033 programmable from the 1980s...

That's what I did 10 years ago when my TI-89 broke right before my Linear Algebra final. I somehow convinced my instructor that when I had my phone out, I was actually using the calculator on my phone.

The new ones have rechargeable batteries, color screens, USB, and Python. So, only a decade out of date.

TI still use really outdated hardware (some ARM9 thing) on their high-end nSpire models.

With the same price even HP Prime G2 has way better hardware (NXP iMX6ULL, Cortex-A7, 256MB DDR3, USB EHCI OTG) and wide software spectrum (no Secure Boot enforced.) I've put full scale Linux and Windows ARM (arm32 IoT) on that platform.

Fun Fact: New Arm 9 chips are still coming out to this day. They are the highest performing Arm chips that feature generic external bus interfaces.

Oppositely here in Japan (where Casio locates), high school students usually don't use calculators on math/physics classes.

That's interesting and somewhat surprising to me. Do they use slide rules and/or function value tables printed on paper?

Not sure about Japan but in Poland the variables in problems are either symbolic and you solve it symbolically, or if they are given as values then they are usually chosen just right to not make arithmetic much of a bother (that actually results in a fun 'sanity check' that if you start getting something waaay crazier than 'normal' you double check if you didn't screw something up somewhere along the way or if there is a better way to solve it).

But everyone is taught to only substitute variables for values at the very, very end so calculators are not needed at all. At some point in education there is no point in testing arithmetic skills over and over again, the problems and the methods of finding out solutions to them are what matters

Exactly, same in the UK. So a typical first question in the maths exam we take at age 14/15 might be ‘Factorise the quadratic x²+5x+6’. No calculator needed.

Almost same as Japan. If we need calculation (like for some physics exam), we use column method on paper.

That makes sense. If you used a calculator's computer algebra system (CAS) for the symbolic manipulation, it would certainly count as cheating.

We were allowed to use calculators when I took my school exams in the uk. But our exam questions often asked us to give the answers in surds i.e 3/4*√2 not as a decimal which our calculators couldn’t do then. Our teachers told us there would never be a question where the answer couldn’t be expressed cleanly using either fractions or surds, that we should practice doing the maths and show our workings on the exam paper and that if we were using a calculator we were wasting time doing data entry as the actual addition / division / subtraction would never be hard enough to justify it. We memorised a table of surds for 30º 45º and 60º angles but I’ve forgotten why now. Also they hard reset our calculators as we went into the exam.

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