99% of the functions that people actually use on these calculators are available on any $15 scientific calculator. The rest of the functions are so cumbersome to use that you really should be doing them with an app or application. My $10 Casio fx-260 SOLAR has been running well for me since college 20 years ago and I haven’t even had to replace a battery.
This looks like a good opportunity for open source… building an open source “education spec” calculator that any manufacturer could build would be much cheaper.
No, what’s shocking is that any math teacher at any level would think that a calculator is a tool for doing math. It’s not even a tool for doing Physics: if you can’t write the equations you can’t solve the problem, and if you can write the equations why would a teacher insist you stick numbers into it and let a machine draw a graph? The entire educational paradigm sucks.
Oh yeah. Like I said, my daughter’s school issues laptops to all the students. Is their homework on it? Only sometimes. Are the textbooks on it? She’s now a senior and has one online textbook.
And of course they can’t put any programs on it, so she’s stuck with an old version of IE and can’t use Google docs. All in a school district where Teslas are common to see in the parking lot.
No, seriously. It’s got a lot more features than a slide rule:
• It’s a calculator, obviously.
• It will make graphs, a time-consuming task to do by hand.
• It’s programmable (this is how I got my start in computer programming— I’m now a Computer Science major thanks to this little baby).
• As a device, it’s pretty much impossible to break permanently, except through grievous physical harm (in particular, you can’t really break it by programming on it, at least in TI-Basic).
• It is not connected to the Internet— this is the critically important feature needed in a math-class calculator.
And once you get to college, you’re not allowed to use your TI-series calculators on tests anymore, because you can program in the answers very easily. They require a standard scientific calculator that you can get for ten or twenty dollars.
Especially since the HP graphing calculators are enormously superior to the TI ones in every imaginable way. Nowadays, if I’m going to plot something, I use Python, but I still keep my HP at my desk because it’s a whole lot faster for a lot of quick calculations.
In university right now, trust me, the fact that textbooks and tuition cost as much as they does not automatically endear me to the cost of this piece of garbage. Honestly, I don’t necessarily want more features or tocuhcreens, just stop insulting my intelligence by charging so much for an ancient technology. Would you happily pay the thousands of dollars the first “pocket” calculators used to cost, today? Fuck no, and I don’t blame you.
Schools require these because they don’t have the money to purchase real technology and this at least provides the basic capability. The average teacher in my local school system has a $100 budget for all students for the entire year. Fund schools at an appropriate level and then you can grip.
People who have not been teachers would be stupefied at the amount of cheating that goes on, as well as the brazenness of it. I was once grading final exams and one page, that had clearly been folded at some point, had at the top of the page the words “Don’t copy me verbatim. We have the same professor.” Apps aren’t allowed because you can’t separate them from text messaging and it is illegal to jam cell phones for any reason.
