Texas Instruments wildly successful, wildly overpriced calculator

Seeing as the TI-84 models came out in 2004, that’s really impressive!

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I had a TI-82 in high school. It was good for crunching numbers, but not all that helpful with learning the fundamentals of math. It was more useful in physics and chemistry than math class. Though I had fun writing programs that would take the inputs and spit out the answers and the teachers seemed mostly okay with that as I was programing them myself, thus obviously understanding the concepts.

I ended up losing it and getting an 85 or 86 in college for my mechanical engineering degree, but lost that my second year. I never did replace it as by that point, the final numbers mattered less than the equations you had to manipulate. Got by just fine with a regular scientific calculator. To this day I just use the built in Windows calculator or, sometimes, Excel.

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I’m younger than you, but calculators were verboden in every math class until Differential Equations.

/barefoot through the waist-deep snow.

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Both of my old HP48s died from despair. I put them in a drawer like you and they never would turn on again. No clue why.

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That’s nothing. why, when I was a boy, using a calculator in a Numerical Analysis class was grounds for immediate expulsion.

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I think I had that Sharp model; stolen by a felonious floor-mate my first year of college.

I think the main reason TI keeps a monopoly is explicitly due to the lack of newer features. Having an Android app may work for duplicating the functions, but being on Android means that there’s likely data connection capabilities, as well as other Android apps. You can’t easily load a cheat sheet into a TI-8x, but putting that into your phone? Easy!

The TI-8x is known technology, which means that PRAXIS or AP or whoever can sign off on their use. When I was taking the ACT in Minnesota back in 1997, the TI-92 was not allowed as it had a QWERTY keyboard. If TI comes out with a TI-87, it needs to be fully tested by all “testing agencies” to ensure it meets the same standards and expectations as other calculators in order to be allowed for use during their tests.

I think that’s fair. I mean, it made sense to me back when I was in high school.

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Citation Needed. I can’t find any evidence that the TI-84 is required for common core at any level or that a graphing calculator would even be allowed for middle school. Education Week has a nice table showing when calculators are allowed:

PARCC does call out the TI-84, but allows for calculators with “functionalities consistent with the TI-84.” It specifically disallows pretty much the same things that were banned when I was in school (calculators with a computer algebra system, QUERTY keyboard, phones/tablets/computers, etc).

It seems that lately, everything unpopular with education is blamed on common core. This looks like a case of an individual school specifying a specific calculator for reasons.

don’t know what to tell you except that this is what the teacher told us at back to school night. i didn’t say this type of calculator was required or allowed during test-taking (what your graphics are illustrating), just that learning how to use this type of calculator is part of the curriculum beginning in 8th grade. this topic is going to close before i can ask the teacher for more info or get the textbook (they leave them at school in their lockers) so that’s all i got for you.

again, unless the teacher is lying, learning the operation of this calculator is in the textbook. i sincerely doubt that makes our school special.

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