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Comment by jckt | Hacker News Reader

Graphing functionality on a phone reminds me of an old TI calculator. I really don't know why recent OSes (be it on PC, smartphone, tablet) always came with such feeble calculators. It's not like TI calculators are difficult to use. Sure if all you want is add/min/mul/div functionality the TI is essentially a traditional calculator, and then behind that you've got all these nifty graphing utilities. It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program, or going to be large in size. But no, in 2013, vanilla OS installations are stuck with a calculator app that has less features than that of a computer a few million times less powerful.

(Now I feel bad; bitching and complaining is against the Open Source Spirit).

Edit: I do recall that OSX comes with something similar, except that not many people actually know of it (as far as I can tell, from my friends with OSX).

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"It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program"

It is surprisingly hard to get something that produces reliable plots. It starts with getting something as simple as sin(1/x) or x/(x^2 + 5x + 1) to plot reasonably well, and gets harder from there soon (edit: if you want to complicate things, pick a function that is only defined on some numbers, such as sqrt(x^2 * sin(x^3 - x). Adding a pair of || around subexpressions also complicates things)

For example, at https://www.desmos.com/calculator (one of the top results from a google search) zooming in on sin(1/x) shows a plot that sometimes doesn't go up to 1.0 for values of x close to zero. Its plot is decent, but deceiving.

And you will have to do those well, as the target audience of students encounters such functions every day.

And the Mac OS X one is Grapher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher)

Just a musing: perhaps its considered not as valuable an investment to program since a (the?) primary market is students, and students are probably not allowed to use phones on tests for obvious reasons (internet connectivity, texting questions to each other, overall distraction). However, TI's are state approved or whatever.

Never been allowed to use a TI for exams in the UK. I've only ever been allowed to use a Casio.

It's incredibly common for TI calculators to be allowed on exams in the United States. Several standardized tests specifically allow only TI calculators, along with a few others. I think GP's comment makes a lot of sense. Most students just aren't going to put the effort into learning how to use another graphing calculator program if they can't even use it in class.

I am currently in Year 13 in London. You are definitely allowed TI in the mathematics exams (A-Levels). TI-89 is one of the only that is banned because of its CAS.

Friends in the French system are allowed the TI 89 though.

Yep, I did Maths A-level in the UK back in the 90s, and a TI graphing calculator was basically a requirement for the exams.

Interesting, I wasn't allowed to use one in A-Levels or university exams.

Just an hint, you can swap the guts of a TI-89 into the body of a TI-83. Don't ask me how I know :)

I think it depends on the modules/exam boards.

Casio also has some powerful calculators, including my beloved Algebra fx2+ and the ClassPad line which slowly converges to a kind of specialised tablet.

Yeah, I used a Casio (non-programmable, but does integrations) for my (British) IGCSEs, a TI for the (International/Swiss) IB, and am back to using 'university approved' Casios at Cambridge.

It's so sad that kids with iphones aren't allowed to use phones on tests. They're being tested in an archaic context for archaic purposes. Under what circumstances are people going to be working without internet access? School has a lot of catching up to do with the real world. :(

Except that standardized tests are reused, which is another difference from real life problems. In real life, you're not always solving a problem that numerous other people have already solved, and posted solutions to.

For any field, there's always some basic knowledge that anyone studying or practicing it simply has to have if they're going to be at all effective. A well-written test should be checking that the students have acquired that knowledge (which can be much of the course content) and can apply it appropriately to problems.

Anyone with an internet connection can easily find out, for example, how to add together two ints in Java. But if someone took an introductory Java course and couldn't do that at the end of it, then they don't deserve to pass because they've clearly not learned what they were supposed to. If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless. Or consider someone with a more time-critical job like a surgeon - they can do specific research beforehand but some level of knowledge (surgical techniques, how to use their tools, anatomy, etc.) is simply going to have to be in their head at the moment they need it or their patient could die.

Also, phones and internet access don't just provide knowledge, they're a way to communicate with everyone else in the room. If you want to see if any particular person has actually learned the material, you obviously can't allow that.

> If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless

Isn't that the point of timed tests? You can structure a test such that the person who needs to look up how to add two ints in Java will waste so much time that they wouldn't be able to finish the test. And if they can search for and apply this knowledge quickly enough, then maybe they've proven that they won't be slow if they have to do it in the real world.

My favourite exams were open book but still hard/long enough that if you didn't already know 95% of the material, you simply wouldn't have time to complete it.

On the other hand, if you allow outside communication (such as unrestricted access to the internet), you open the door for "I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone in the answers for me" - which isn't generally an applicable skill in the real world.

As an aside, I hated open book exams - if you were talented and knew the material, you could typically blast through a closed-book examination in half the allotted time and get out of there, while the open-book exams were far longer and more tedious.

>"I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone in the answers for me" - which isn't generally an applicable skill in the real world.

I would argue that this is also a valuable skill. Knowing who to hire, assessing the person's abilities, figuring out if they can actually get the job done in the time allotted. Sure it's not at the same level that a hiring manager at a tech company in the real world would have to make, but then again the normal CS test questions aren't at that level either.

It probably depends on the subject but if they don't have that basic knowledge they're not going to be effective filling in the test either, even with Google it always takes longer.

Ideally tests should check the deeper understanding of the student and not just his memory skills. In that case Internet access is also not a problem.

Agreed with your reasoning within your framework. But I'm a little skeptical of the utility of this framework for thinking about learning. Why do we test people without communication, when most of what they're going to be doing throughout most of life is going to involve communicating with others, one way or another?

I think there IS utility in assessing people with the constraint of "you can't talk to anybody else", but I'm not comfortable with that being the dominant, primary means of assessment. It should be consistent with the likelihood that you'll actually be forced to work stuff out on your own- maybe 10, 20% at most?

Your thoughts?

I think it's a shame computer like devices (iphone, ipad, what you want) are not allowed. Learning to use them efficiently in a time constrained context would be a really valuable skill.

Internet access is a lot more complex though, you'd have to filter what they can access and monitor everything every student is accessing, and that doesn't seem worth it for most tests. Image a scenario where the students just throws any question on a random looking site and some hired expert on the other side writes appropriate answers on the fly. Your test won't have any meaning anymore.

In which case I think the flaw is with the test, not the student. Why does a kid need to memorize something that he can get on-the-fly expert answers from? Why memorize something you can look up? =\

The memorizing part is where computer could be allowed. You'll still have to remember how to get the information back though.

Now test are flawed by definition, you'll always have to create some artifical restriction to control what aspect you are assessing. Idealy you never test someone by putting him/her in a room with a pncil and paper, you'd assess how good the students cleared real tasks in realistic conditions.

What about the kids without iPhones? Are they handicapped because they can't afford one? Or is the school expected to provide hundreds of iPhones?

I'd suggest that they do what we do when we don't have the resources we need in the 'real world'- figure out some way to collaborate with others!

Collaborate during a test? That usually leads to cheating. It would also likely disadvantage the person they are working with who now has to share resources. Not to mention the fact that if this person doesn't own an iPhone they either won't know how to use it or won't be quick at using it slowing them down (bad in an exam situation). The students who do own iPhones will be faster and will be better because they are more experienced with the tools - not because they are better students.

Not necessarily, although it might be difficult for math tests.

In school we had one larger test in German where the teacher left us alone for 4 hours. What I noticed was that we did collaborate to some extent – we shared and discussed ideas. But since we had to write an essay with our interpretation of some piece of literature there wasn't much possibility of "cheating" per se. Simply copying the text from another would not work and copying their ideas outright wouldn't either. And to get at least something of decent length there wasn't the option of fooling around for three hours either. Granted, this was in 11th grade, so we were a bit older already. It may well fail spectacularly in other environments. The teacher knew us for a few years and trusted us, and it worked out.

When I was in college in the 80s there was an explosion of creativity in the calculator market (kind of like the TV and camera markets today -- they're all going broke and trying to come up with new killer products). One of the things that became very popular was calculators with 32kB or 64kB of RAM, a QWERTY keyboard, that ran BASIC.

Anyway, I was pure math major and we could bring pretty much anything short of an actual desktop computer into exams -- it was pretty much useless. (Now, a few years later, and Mathematica running on a maxed out Mac would have been pretty darn useful.)

We were actually allowed to use Mathematica on our Linear Algebra exams this semester. I think it made the tests a lot more effective because you didn't have to go through the algebraic trouble of finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors, so the professor could focus more of the testing time on applications of those values.

Having a computer in class opens the door for cheating, but in smaller classes it would be easy to tell if a student were browsing the Internet rather than finding a determinant.

Here's the thing about calculation in particular: Yes, if your ultimate goal is to perform the calculation and nothing more, you'll be able to use a tool for the job in the real world.

However, many times the calculation is just a very small piece of a much larger puzzle. In such situations, being able to perform small computations rapidly in your head makes a qualitative difference that can really give you a competitive advantage.

Just... Wow. I suppose essays are the same, cut and paste from Wikipaedia?

In my experience, if you are really prepared for an exam, you know the formulas by heart anyway. I myself passed tests designed in a way that calculators could be disallowed. Some of them even had a reminder section with all the needed formulas. But unprepared students still failed them, because they were simply not used to use them and they therefore ran out of time. This translates in the real world: knowing things by heart and their mechanic is the difference between the guy that spends one hour on a problem ans the guy who spends 10 minutes on it.

On that note, iPad doesn't even have the iPhone Calculator app, and it's _impossible_ to get it (without hacking) because it's a built-in app; one you cannot remove nor acquire from the App Store.

It's also missing Compass, Voice Memo and Passbook apps. Edit: Weather app too.

yes weird, plus the weather app is missing too.

What's the reasoning behind the decision? Was it Steve Jobs who decided that?

They just haven't created the full size iPad versions for them at this time. iOS 6/7 added some previously iPhone-only built-in apps.

I've always had a feeling that it's to differentiate iPad from iPhone. If they had the exact same apps, right down to a scaled up Calculator with gigantic buttons on the 10" display, it might make it less likely for consumers to think of iPad as a separate concept from iPhone. Calculator and Weather wouldn't really translate that well to a huge screen, anyways.

And, of course, there are several great third-party apps to fill the void if you need them.

Missing compass because the WiFi version does not contain a GPS or magnetic compass.

There is a cellular version of the iPad too.

Bitching and complaining is good for products, makes them better. Don't know much about OSS spirit, but doesn't their work need any improvement??

By OSS spirit I meant that it's better to get coding than start complaining. But I see your point -- indeed we should do both, and plenty of it.

On OS X it's Graphing Calculator. See the amazing story behind it: http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

I was just going to write this comment myself before checking to see if I'd been beaten. It's definitely one of the great stories of computer history.

Yep, Grapher is a nice app with an interesting history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher

Does Grapher share any source with Graphing Calculator?

I guess it might, given that Apple shipped Graphing Calculator with Mac OS before, and given Graphing Calculator's interesting early history (http://www.pacifict.com/Story/)

(I wonder how Apple negotiated that deal originally. I guess some lawyers spent quite some time arguing whose intellectual property it originally was. The programmers weren't paid by Apple, but worked at Infinite Loop)

It's depressing to me that the closest I can get to the TI-92+ I had in college is to emulate a TI-92+ on my computer or Android devices (actually on a tablet it's not too bad). My other options (Octave, Matlab, etc.) are way too heavy for what I want to do and require too much time to learn.

They don't have that sort of pickup-and-use feature my old calculators used to have. I think it's the presence of most of the buttons I'm ever going to be interested in on the keyboard rather than having to figure out how to type something that means the same as an integral or some such. The discoverability of those buttons beats most modern software hands down.

I also suspect that writing simple to use general purpose solvers and simplifiers for the things the TI calcs do (the CAS) is likely very hard. I remember putting even pretty complex physics equations with all sorts of trig functions and exponents and integrals and such in during college and it handled most of them without trouble and pretty printed the result.

Ha I had a TI92 (not plus) a number of years ago. Weighed a ton - you could kill someone with it. Sold it and got an HP48GX after I discovered that you couldn't get the plus module for it in the UK for a reasonable price. Never looked back.

I miss my TI-92+ as well. It feels like an iPad has enough screen real estate to be able to simulate the same experience, and I was surprised that nobody has done it yet.

Edit: looks like there are some good options for Android that actually emulate TI calculators, and apparently TI has Nspire for the iPad.

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