Comment by allegory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allegory | Hacker News Reader

It holds a monopoly because mathematics teachers teach things by rote and procedure, not the underlying concepts from experience. Any deviation from the non-TI norm is considered a teaching risk because the staff and students no longer know which buttons to press and in what order.

Perhaps 5% of people may develop an understanding past that.

I myself, as a calculator and math geek, after using just about every damn mid/high end calculator out there (TI82, TI83, TI89, TI nSpire CAS, HP48GX, HP50g TI92, Casio 9750G, Casio Algebra Fx) ended up using a shit Casio through school and my degree and Postgrad study. Conclusion:

Buy the best non-programmable Casio you can afford and leave it at that. My most useful device was £15 (Casio 991 ES PLuS). Its an awesome device. That and a mechanical pencil and some grey matter.

The TI dependency is a symptom of sickness in the system, nothing more.

Edit: found it. This is what I had: http://casio.ledudu.com/images/calculs/casio/machines/fx991V...

> It holds a monopoly because mathematics teachers teach things by rote and procedure, not the underlying concepts from experience.

Really? That was never my experience.

Indeed, algebra got a lot easier once I just started memorizing it. Years later I learned that portions of our system of algebra is largely an agreed upon system for ease of communication and that other algebras also exist for working in other domains.

(Taking formal logic also helped explain things a lot! Having to prove the commutative property from a couple of basic axioms is enlightening.)

All in all, the entirety of my public school math education in the US was highly focused on concepts and theory.

Here in Spain, in the school and high-school is forbidden using programmable calculators in exams. Even on doing the "selectividad", a pre university huge exam, is forbiden these type of calculators. I'm very happy with my old fx-85wa. It have all the advantages of a simple programmable calculator (natural math expressions and edit the formula that you typed), but can't store programs or functions, so isn't a programmable calculator. Plus works on a small lithium battery + solar cell. I only need to change the battery one time in this last 15 years.

Hmm. There could be a market for a "disruptive tech" in this segment: programmable calculators that look exactly like scientific non-programmable calculators, and behave that way to someone who doesn't know some (user-configurable) keystrokes to "unlock" the hidden power. When this is invoked, it changes the meaning of certain buttons, like say stats functions or whatever).

There could be some connector on the circuit board for easy programming via your PC (say over USB). This would not be exposed unless the plastic is taken off. With that, you could conveniently cram the calculator full of useful code prior to an exam, then access it in the special mode.

Now imagine this was done as a mod kit for several popular mass-produced calculators ...

I imagine that poorly funded schools in poor neighborhoods have trouble getting students to buy these things (or buying them for students who can't). I feel like plenty of teachers would tell their students to buy a cheap graphing calculator, just so that they could teach a class where everyone actually had the device. There's definitely a market for this.

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