I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course.
I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
But normally it depends on the subject and if the automation/machine solves the primary skill being teached or if its just a "secondary/tertiary" skill. Are you in a Calculus 101 class? Calculators like TI-89 are likely to be prohibited when examining for deriving analytical solutions for derivatives and integrals.
Statistics, Physics or any other subjects that needs applied maths? Such a calculator is probably a minimum requirement to take the course.
The other thing it was awesome for was solving systems of linear equations. I could do the nodal or loop analysis just fine, I'd write down the matrix that represented the system of equations and then just punch that matrix in and invert it.
The day when the relationship between s in a Laplace transform and d/dt finally clicked was also a really excellent day :D
I vaguely remember thinking that one likely reason shortcuts like mine were not prohibited was because no one in charge suspected that such things were even possible with current technology, or if they were, that a child would be able to exploit it. But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
Yeah, totally, just to be clear I'm not judging.
In fact, if you programmed it to handle those operations, one could argue you had already learned a big chunk of what was going to be measured in the exams.
Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
The problem is (example from mathematics): even if you are capable of deriving some formula (you thus understood the topic well), it takes a lot of time in the exam. Looking at the cheat sheet is much faster - in particular when the time is somewhat precious in the exam.
Edit: Automate in the sense of coding it myself, not in the sense of downloading some software.