The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: An outdated calculator still holds a monopoly
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What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.
It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.
This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems.
The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.
What happens when one kid writes a quadratic solver and gives it to half the class?
I probably gave my teachers too much credit, but the classes that could use calculators were usually taught by teachers who knew about programming the things.
Our professor didn't worry about cheating, he just designed the tests while keeping in mind probably every student had written notes on their calculator. In fact, he allowed us to have all our notes and books with us while performing the test, just like you would do in the real world when tackling a difficult problem.
http://education.ti.com/en/us/products/calculators/graphing-...
She showed her students, everyone poked at it for a bit, and then it was never used again. It didn't provide much additional educational use.
That would be an epic fail. Like most of us, I carried around a 4-pack of AAA for my calc (at least thats what the TI-81 took) and if the battery finally ran out during a test, no problem, 30 seconds later you're back on the air. Also the teachers sold batteries or you could bum them off a neighbor. With rechargeable, I guess you just fail?
Also rechargables are carefully value engineered to fail after a couple years, so that would increase costs quite a bit. A school system that bought a couple TI84 a decade ago can keep on using them today with COTS walmart batteries, but sealed rechargables means they would have to keep buying them every couple years. With careful value engineering the mfgr could likely get the lifetime down to a bit over a year, and sell kids a new calc every single august for school.
Note that these calcs, at least the TI-81, were not like smartphones. A set of batteries lasted at least a couple months even with some game playing. I wrote some text adventures and others wrote little arcade games and still we got over a month at a time. The -81 was extremely crude as a programming language even compared to 1980s home computer BASICs.
All the years of using it with physics homework and statistics homework and whatnot has wired its usage into my brain.
Sure, I could use R or Python, but when all I need to do is some simple math the calculator is always faster. It has tactile buttons I can operate with one hand, a clear readable screen, and a battery that lasts long. And it's simple.
If mine broke I'd buy another one.
Graphing calculators were the first mass market mobile computers under $200 with what you could almost refer to as an app store, via ticalc.org (oh how many hours I spent on there). The interfaces had to be easy to use with low resolution screens and usually four directional buttons. Apps had to be about content. Games were pretty fun.
My TI-89 has survived 11 years. It's survived bike falls, being thrown across the room several times (when I was too quick to grab it and it went flying out of the cover). I use it infrequently but the batteries haven't been changed in over a year. I still have more screen real estate when I am typing on it than I do with my iPhone 5 (both in vertical and landscape). It has actual buttons and I have muscle memory so I don't even have to look at it when I type in numbers and symbols.
I have a periodic table app on my TI-89 that has been on there since 2003. The information someone in chemistry or physics needs is quicker to access than http://www.ptable.com or wikipedia. I'm sure there are apps on an iPod that are probably better now, but an iPod's batteries don't last months.
What could usurp it? Something in the same form factor that can last 48+ hours and take AA or AAA batteries. Something that provides temporary instructor override, allowing an instructor to enforce a policy temporarily (i.e. disable the CAS). Something that might integrate well with tools from TI that are out there. Something that's useful from middle school up to engineering/chemistry/physics.
Maybe something e-ink (and/or e-ink buttons), plastic, ARM or Atmel, Linux, python and some sort of CAS (Mathematica/Maple branded) by default, with an App store/ecosystem. Something $50-$75. WiFi only, but off by default. Something that probably looks a bit like a nokia n800 or blackberry. I think that would be reasonable.
Incredible that TI still reigns supreme.
As far as disrupting goes, I use TyDig on my iPad as my most often used "calculator" these days. The 92 doesn't come out much. But for the market (high school) it is hard to beat the combination of features and cost that a calculator brings to the table.
A TI calculator fast enough to run NumPy to build simulations and interactive gizmos would be super cool though. Allowing students to build colorful mathematical animations and physics simulations using simple building blocks would be awesome. Of course that can all be done with laptops but having things in the palm of your hand shouldn't be underestimated.
I've been waiting for years for TI to make a graphing calc smartphone app, but with margins such as those described in the article, why would they? It'll likely take a major shift in the testing standards (i.e. allowing mobile devices) for this situation to change. Test proctors might have to become more vigilant, but I imagine if airplane mode was strictly enforced, then smartphones might be allowed. Seems that the communications features (which can facilitate cheating) are the primary concern.
If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)?
The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT.
Edit: Casio in the article competes on price.
[1] http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy Five different brands have at least 3 approved graphing calculators for the SATs.
This was a pain, and it was compounded by the fact that the HP-48 didn't have the same features as the TI-89, so I was frequently out of luck. The teacher wrote his homeworks and tests with an eye towards what was doable without too much effort on a TI-89, and I imagine that the TI people chose the featureset for the 89 with an eye towards what people would want to do in high school classes, so using anything else was an uphill battle.
(We also had occasional homeworks in Excel, and I ran into the same trouble trying to do them in Perl. It didn't help that I was very far from an expert in either Perl or the HP-48g.)
It was obvious that if you didn't have the calculator that everyone else has, you might as well not even bring the book to class. You spent more time trying to find the equivalent settings and processes to do the work than actually getting anything done.
A competitor would have to include the exact same formulas in the exact same menu locations.
I remember a 'calculator Olympics' involving solving an incredible half-page calculation involving scores of parentheses and transcendental functions. Everybody else launched into typing all that into their TI calculator. I started from the innermost expression (as ALL RPN-trained people do). It was an identity. Hm. As I worked my way out, everything was an identity (sin(90) etc). I got the answer without ever touching a button on my calculator.
THAT's what math class should be teaching.
"Apple sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory"
I tend to let it slide when people get memory and storage confused, but I hold journalists to a higher standard. This isn't even a semantic error; this came right after describing the RAM capacity of a TI-84 Plus C Silver. Nothing Matt McFarland wrote in this article was wrong, but it certainly wasn't highly-informed either...
Comparing TI calculators to consumer electronics is a rather moot point. It's better to compare against the plummeting costs of microcomputers in general. The Raspberry Pi is better proof that TI is marking their products up 1000%+! Nobody needs a calculator with a 1GHz processor and 512GB of RAM, and 8-128GB of flash storage, so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?
Because TI has tried in the past to introduce more powerful calculators, and that fell flat.
The 84 exists because schools expect it. That is all. Until they accept your smartphone as a calculator, TI can markup the 84 as much as they want and everyone has to buy it because there is no free market in school calculators.
Having a computer algebra system in my handheld calculator got me all the way from pre-algebra to intro diff eq in high school. It's hard to say whether it was unfair, but being able to try algebra and calculus things out on the CAS really helped me explore and understand concepts.
I was also notorious for bringing a slide rule into tests in case the batteries ran out on the calculator.
When I was in junior high (in France) it was about 50/50 between TI and Casio. In high school a few kids had an HP48. The rare time there was something specific to do with the calculator (eg. calculating sequences) the teacher would ask one geek from each camp to explain to the class how to do it with calculators of that brand.
I'm old enough that my vocational training in high school math classes was on the venerable yet new at that time TI-81. That vocational training was not terribly useful in university classes, the rot had not reached that high (at that time)
How about a bigger screen, more memory and a faster chip? I get that there still exists a calculator niche, but come on, it doesn't mean you just don't even try!
I think that was actually the game that got me into programming, to figure out "how did they even do that." (and taught myself in isolation such terrible things as not understanding what a for loop was actually used for, and using it as a time delay loop.)
Man that game was great.