That’s actually one reason to be a trifle nervous about a scheme that makes them a substitute for a piece of educational equipment.
As a supplement, no problem. Software implementation makes scientific calculator an effectively free add-on to the phone you already have? Great, fantastic, all for it. Progress all round.
However, at least in my experience providing educational technology support for K-12; teachers get very, very, jumpy about things that are unreliable or liable to derail a class. And that’s fair enough; they face demanding expectations about what they’ll manage to teach in the 40 or 50 minutes they get with the class; so losing 10 of those to a technical fault or someone messing around on Youtube can really spoil the lesson plan.
And, at least until we see some radical advances in complex system reliability, the only way to approach the level of predictable and foolproof they want(and have a decent claim to need) is to get fairly strictly command-and-control about it. There’s just no way, even with tech coverage expensive enough that a few crates of TI-84s would be a rounding error, that you can reasonably assure predictable operation without control over configuration.
In wealthy school districts, where the ipad or chromebook or whatnot is likely to be ancillary to what the student has on their person or at home, I don’t see that as a problem. It’s a school supply, you’ve been granted limited access to it to further your education, if you think IT is a bunch of humorless buzzkills suck it up.
If you aren’t in that situation, though, you have to be much more concerned about the implications of making students’ primary(or only) computing access be through a command-and-control appliance optimized for reliability and limited distraction; rather than any scope for personal discovery; or just messing around.
The situation is especially bad if the plan is to actually use the students’ personal hardware: the amount of intrusion required to properly standardize it is pretty creepy(especially as a state actor imposing policy on poor children/families); and it’s also pretty likely that the hell of trying to beat a bunch of motley low-end Androids into conformity in a BYOD scenario would be demanding enough to make the effort a bit of a false economy.
As noted, none of these concerns apply to the handy option of using software to turn devices you already have into capable calculators, that’s a pure win; but there are definitely things to be cautious of in mixing technology and education, especially in cases where students don’t have a personal supply that insulates them from the institutional policy as soon as they switch devices.
It’s a pity that there aren’t more elegant approaches(in addition to cute hardware and genuinely cool screen tech, that was a bit of circle-squaring that the OLPC project was doing some interesting work on); but the state of what is generally available isn’t so hot for anything that doesn’t tack strongly toward ‘free and unreliable’ or ‘IT rules with an iron fist’. iOS is generally the more competent of the mobile options; and does not serve two masters elegantly or well. Android’s “for work” at least tries to support the two-master use case; but its execution leaves something to be desired.
Desktop/laptop scenarios are generally better, because they at least have a robust concept of multi-user systems; though I certainly wouldn’t vouch for the behavior of a classroom full of laptops if students had admin rights on them.
What I’d be very curious to know is, if TI were to be cut out of the picture, what advances in contemporary mobile tech could do to a TI-84-alike:
We are talking either a 96x64 or 320x240 pixel display, a Z80 clocked at or below 50MHz, under a meg of RAM and 4 megs of flash; and a keyboard.
In fairness to the TI, at least when it was the 83+, the keyboard was actually decent-ish; definitely a cut above a remote control quality keyboard, and the case plastics were solid; but those specs are pitiful compared to the guts of something like the $12 cellphone; though a calculator implementation of that would need to skip the RF components in favor of more buttons and a larger(though not necessarily higher resolution) screen.
There’s nothing wrong with dedicated hardware that has one job and does it well; it’s just that, technology having marched to where it is, there are few innocent explanations for it costing $150, rather than more like a 10th of that.
