Because their main market isn't permitted to have phones on their desks during tests.
Schools would have to get into the constant cat and mouse game any parental control software maker gets into to have a chance to stop it and that fight usually goes to the students rather than the adults trying to lock the device down.
I wonder if one could make some sort of overlay that you can put on top of the touchscreen when used an emulated calculator to help with that?
One approach could simply have a cover over the virtual keyboard area, with holes in the cover over the virtual keys. This would give you some tactile feedback when moving between keys.
Fancier would be a cover with actual push buttons that when pushed touch the screen with something that will register on touchscreens.
To make it really fancy, also have an "On" button that rather than touching the screen uses Bluetooth LE to communicate with something on the phone that launches or switches to the calculator that matches the keyboard overlay.
I'm also guessing their product margins are better on hardware than they would be on software, since there are so many other calculator apps available. The market of people who want a TI-branded calculator app on Android or iOS is a lot smaller than the captive student market.
IMHO eventually the tides will shift and school districts and exams will start allowing cell phones, and I imagine just before that happens they will suddenly discover they have a nice Android/iOS app ready to launch.
IMHO eventually the tides will shift and school
districts and exams will start allowing cell phones,
At the same time, kids are getting cell phones at earlier ages, and "cell" phones have already evolved into general purpose computing devices which are becoming essentially required for modern life.
Eventually, I think it's going to be hard to justify requiring students to purchase specialized calculator hardware when everyone already has a cell phone.
As to whether or not it's a good thing, who knows.. But the hypervigilance against student cheating only exists because of the outsized focus on exams. College Board clearly wants to prevent cheating on the SAT so they can retain their position as the gatekeeper of college admissions. But perhaps final exams and standardized tests aren't the best approach to evaluating students, in the same way that whiteboard interviews might not be the best way to conduct interviews.
whiteboard interviews might not be the best way to conduct interviews.
But the hypervigilance against student cheating only exists because of the outsized focus on exams.
With net access, students for example could be fed the literal answers to a standardized test that was already taken by people in a different time zone. And what if there's a net outage during the exam?
Also, while the TI calculators are obviously underpowered and their stranglehold on the educational market borders on corruption, there is value in a standardized tool. What about students without phones and cellular data plans? What about students who can't afford apps, etc?
Last but not least, while the compute power of a TI calculator pales in comparison to, say, a phone or RaspberryPi at half the cost -- is the lack of compute power on tap really a problem? I got through calc I-III just fine with a TI back in the day. I would not say the TI was my limiting factor in any way.
I doubt that will happen as an allowed accessory device, but what will happen, I expect, both school-issued and standardized exams will move from exams for which you can use an accessory calslculating device to online exams done on (possibly standardized, definitely closely monitored) computers which will have calculator utilities installed (possibly integrated into the exam), rendering dedicated educational calculators superfluous.