No idea why but in France too we had to buy this expensive piece of shit.
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I’d like to thank Texas Instruments for forcing kids to buy ridiculously expensive calculators, because when I found out how much I’d have to spend on one to take trig and calculus, it helped spur my decision to dump them and take art classes instead, which led to me going into design in college.
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And that, of course, is their cue to find something new to replace it.
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in our state the students are allowed to use graphing calculators but not computer to work the math on their high-stakes state tests. my school provides the students with a standard calculator and does not require that they buy one.
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SwissMicros (dot com) makes retro versions of HP calculators. If my HP15C ever dies, I’ll but one of those.
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RPN or bust!
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My wife had to get one for a statistics class, and it had to be that certain TI because that’s the only one the instructor knew how to use to set up the formula (or whatever). As opposed to teaching them how to solve it, they told them “Turn on your TI, press this, then that, now press this” etc.
She got that calculator used off eBay and, sure enough, now that my son needs one it has to be something else.
I used Casio scientific calculators in high school (for Algebra 2, Chemistry, Physics, Trig…). (Plural because I misplaced one for a while.) The guy next to me in Physics worked at a Radio Shack, and got hold of some programmable calculator. When the teacher gave us some formula he’d just save it into the calculator, then plug in the numbers et voila! I got by with writing crib notes on the instruction manual, which was tucked into the folding case. I was lucky in college, I only needed one semester of math (for Radio-TV-Film degree) and I tested out of that.
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Now that it’s come up twice, I need to add that slide rules and abaci were also not allowed.
We had paper, pencils and tables (once we got to trig), but no devices. I guess we should’ve considered ourselves fortunate we weren’t made to solve log and trig problems by long division (well, except for they made us do it once just to show us how grateful we should’ve been to have the tables).
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My son is a freshman this year. We were given the option to buy one for $100 or loan one from the school for free, but pay $100 if he breaks it. We chose option 2, and I’m still not sure if he has used it yet.
They were going for $60 on Amazon in the summer, but the lowest I see now is $70. I assume they’re real and not a knockoff?
I was a bit too old for these to be a thing for me in high school, although I did have the HP48 in university. One nice thing about these TIs was apparently they have a Z80-compatible CPU and young people even to this day learn Z80 assembly language to write programs (mostly games and demos) that are better than what the BASIC interpreter on them can do.
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Same here, except I was so bad at Algebra (took it twice!) that I didn’t even get to Calculus. I honed my abstract thinking skills by taking classes in Symbolic Logic and Discrete Math, which covered my college math requirements (and were a lot of fun, too)!
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I teach basic math at the Community College Level. A scientific calculator is required, but I tell them to get the least expensive one they can. We cannot use cell phone apps because of the probability of cheating on exams.
I find the TI 83,84,Nspire etc to be bulky and UN-intuitve. It takes me much longer to get the owners of one of those beasts up to speed than any of the cheap ones. i.e. TI-31SX or Casio. In the real world, I use excel or Mathematica, and if I need a real calculator I have TWO HP35S set to RPN. Yeah, I’m a geek.
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In my day it was the HP41C to drool over.
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I just took a statistics class at a community college, and ended up using the ios app graphncalc83. It works just like the TI calculator, so all the examples in the textbooks just work. Desmos looks nice but completely different from the TI.
I will see if I get a similar response later today.
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I was in the first wave of students to implement Ti calculators in our HS. They were provided by the school for the math classes that used them. They still had the double A batteries =O
I love, and still use, my Ti-85 that I bought in 1992…it’s older than a lot of my students =)
I liked the upgrade to the TI-96…the built in conversions and constants are excellent.
As is the placement of the E key (unlike the 82/84 series. why two key presses? WHY?)
And, the solver is nice on those.
Though my recommendation for my students currently is the TI-36x Pro. Has most of the functionality of the 85, but 1) usable on their final standardized exam, and 2) not so many features are to be TOO overwhelming.
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That was my calculator of choice in college. Only very few of us didn’t have a TI which was sometimes a pain but I’ve just accepted that my purchase choices usually go against the grain for better or worse.
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I use wxMaxima instead of a typical graphing calculator app. It’s open source, amazingly capable and also does symbolic algebra.
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The TI was the suggested calculator, but I used an HP 48 series calculator, and refused to pay $100 for a piece of crap calculator that was less functional than what I bought in the 90’s.
It costs more, but the HP-Prime was a calculator that I loved, is what I got for my daughter, and I expect it to do very well through college.
It is accepted on all the college entrance exams except one, and I don’t recall which that is.
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