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Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class

211 points by lewisflude 7y ago

BoorishBears 7y ago
I can never be too mad at TI for this, since I'm only a programmer today because of a Ti-83+ and TI-BASIC Or at least that's what I thought about I got to the part about the guilt the author felt over the purchase, and the teacher trying to buy them out of pocket. It really is despicable that we require 100$+ purchase every student's education when there are so many realistic cheaper alternatives
- umvi 7y ago
  Shouldn't there be millions of used Ti-83s by now? Seems like there shouldn't be a real need to buy new when the market should be saturated with used. I know I have 2 Ti-83s in a box somewhere collecting dust. This could be solved with a simple sellback program. 1. Purchase from school for $100 2. Sell back for $95 3. Repeat forever until calculator breaks
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Do most people them them on to college as well though?
    - smachiz 7y ago
      I only needed a TI-83 in high school, but I think my college classed wanted me to buy a new TI-89. I still have my TI-89 in my office though I haven't used it ever... no idea where the TI-83 went.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - localhost8000 7y ago
      In my college experience, students weren't permitted to use graphing calculators in math classes, and other math-heavy classes (eg, physics, chemistry, etc) used simple math on exams and permitted laptops during labs/classwork.
      - krisgee 7y ago
        Same, the only time I used a TI graphing calculator was during one unit of high school math. I don't think we used them during the test for that semester either. The general rule was scientific calculator only.
    - NoInputSignal 7y ago
      I wasn't really a math person in grade school, but I remember needing a scientific calculator in middle school and a graphing calculator in highschool. When I got to college I retook the remedial math courses (starting with the equivelent of Algebra II) before I could take calculus (and the other math courses for a CS degree). Not a single professor of a math course let us use a graphing calculator, and infact, most had a "no calculator" policy. I never really put that together: you can learn the same curriculum with or without a calculator.
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      The only time I was allowed to use a graphing calculator in college was a statistics class. My batteries actually crapped out right before the final and the professor was nice/trusting enough to let me use a TI-89 emulator on my phone.
  - BoorishBears 7y ago
    There are tons of them already for sale cheaper, enough I don't think the overhead of running such a program would be justified: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+83 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+83 But there's concerted effort to keep the perceived value of used calculators from being too high from TI and their partners. Things like peripherals that only work with new devices for lab work, to textbook examples that rely on color (which only newer ones have). As soon as you go up a couple of levels in age you see the prices start to spike: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+nspire+cx https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+nspire+cx I say perceived value, because in reality the Ti-83 would still work for 99% of use cases, but TI has it's finger in the education pie, so it's easy for them to get textbooks to say things like "TI Nspire CX recommended" or have images and button presses that will only match their newest calculators
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      In reality a $5 “scientific calculator” (or a slide rule) works for 99% of use cases (high school math homework/exams). The only thing I know of which strictly needs the TI calculator is the AP calculus test. Students should just borrow a calculator a few times to prepare and then for a few hours for this single test. Getting them to spend $100 each to keep the calculator is a total racket. Better still would be to eliminate the need for a TI calculator from the AP exam, and then there would be no need for it whatsoever.
- elwell 7y ago
  I used to make games during class, then continue on the bus, and some more at home. Text input on that was quite slow though.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  That's sort of how I started programming, as well. First TI Basic, then Z80 assembly. I still have my TI-83 and TI-89 some 20 years after graduating. Also still have the parallel port link (not that I have a working computer with a parallel port anymore). When I was in HS, my teachers became wise to the existence of apps that would display the mem cleared message, so they would go around to each student and clear the memory themselves. This annoyed me as I'd written a lot of useful to me utilities (not cheats) and games, so I wrote a not-so-little program that emulated all of the system menus. You have to enter a hidden key combo to get out of it. Looking back at it, the code embarrasses me because it is so goddamn awful. I didn't know how to write functions or use the stack properly. It was just one giant mess of jumps and conditional branches. But hey, it worked. Sadly, I think all of my Z80 assembly is lost. I don't think I shared it on any sites, either.
- DamnInteresting 7y ago
  My very earliest programming experience was making games and math utilities on a TI-82 in the early 1990s. That little machine helped me cultivate skills that still pay my bills to this day.
ddevault 7y ago
Shamelessly posting an old project of mine: https://knightos.org https://knightos.org The build server has been dead for years, so you'll have to compile it yourself. If anyone's TI calculator is gathering dust in your closet, you might find this to be a fun hack to play with :)
- dang 7y ago
  2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360757 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747729
  - ddevault 7y ago
    2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630779 (June) 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990
    - dang 7y ago
      Ah yes!
- ihuman 7y ago
  On the download page, it says that, "KnightOS has no math or graphing support past a simple 4-operation calculator." Is that still the case?
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Yes.
- nexuist 7y ago
  You did this! I remember posts about this on cemetech. Tiny world.
mkl 7y ago
They didn't in New Zealand; Casio did. Then students come to university and stop using them much - too limited and primitive compared to computers and smartphones, too powerful for the courses where we're trying to teach and assess analytical maths skills.
gfrangakis 7y ago
Why have no edtechs created a low cost version of the TI-83/84? One that mirrors the functionality of the TI calcs so that they can still be used with textbooks that are dependent on those. The article estimates the TI's cost $15-20 to make, but even that seems very high for what they are. I imagine the harder part is getting approval from the organizations that administer standardized tests like College Board and the states themselves.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  There are a lot of buttons. Those probably push the BOM up. If you switched to using a shitty membrane keypad you could probably save a lot of money.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    If I remember the innards of my TI-83 correctly (I used it during school 15 years ago, added LED lighting to the display and tore it apart for that purpose) Texas Instruments already uses a shitty membrane keypad. At least I don't remember seeing lots of microswitches.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      It's possible. I'm old enough that I had an 82.
  - buttonemuu 7y ago
    How are the buttons different from a $12 Casio fx-300ES for example?
  - mkl 7y ago
    I don't think I've used a TI calculator (they're not in NZ much), but with the sole exception of my HP 48G every make and model of calculator I've used in the past 30+ years has used a crappy membrane keypad.
- bitwize 7y ago
  This is literally like asking why no biotechs have come in and disrupted, say, the CPAP machine market with lower cost alternatives. Calculators used in university entrance examinations must be approved and certified by THE COLLEGE BOARD™, who will only approve specific models and not workalikes. The stated reason for this is to prevent cheating, but as usual the creation of monopolies who can then charge what they like is a nice side benefit, if not the primary benefit.
bjornjaja 7y ago
Not related to the monopoly stuff but I like HP calculators best! For college I used an HP 35S—it’s a programmable scientific calculator and fun to program because it uses RPN stacks for calculations and storing results.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I always preferred the RPN HPs. I used an HP-55 through most of college. (I started with an early TI scientific calculator; I began university just as calculator prices were really dropping and discontinued HP models only became relatively affordable a little later.) Then I had a variety of other HPs over the years including an HP-41CV with a Financial Pac. Unfortunately, the modern "HP" calculators are not as well made or have as good a keyboard feel. (I actually didn't have a calculator until college.)
- hvs 7y ago
  Nothing beats my old HP-48G that I used in college. Unfortunately, HP has all but left that space and my HP 35S (yes, I do own one) is but a shadow of what HP calculators once were.
  - mkl 7y ago
    Well, a 48GX would! (The same but with more RAM that's also expandable.) I have a 48G too, but nowadays I just use computers.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  I have a 16C on my desk, fwiw.
- macintux 7y ago
  I had to hunt online for a used HP when I took a college class in 2003(ish) because the final exam needed a calculator and I honestly had no idea how to use non-RPN (I'm sure I could have figured it out, but been much slower). I'd been using RPN since high school.
  - 7y ago
briffle 7y ago
In highschool, I had a TI-83, and had fun doing things like programming blackjack on it, so I could look like I was doing work while having fun. I went to an engineering school and switched to an HP-48GX for my years at it, and fell in love with the RPN input. I miss that calculator, but not the TI. I think I sold the HP 8 years after I bought it for $20 more than I bought it for. They were discontinued, and surveyors and others that had special modules that could plug into it would pay a premium for a replacement one.
- klodolph 7y ago
  I had a TI-86 and then won an HP-48GX. At some point the TI-86 was lost or stolen, I don’t care, the HP-48GX was so much better. I especially liked working with units, which made everything in science classes that much more convenient. The only thing I missed about the TI-86 was the Mario clone, with level editor, and a puzzle game called DStar. While the TI-83 and 86 had a pedestrian Z80, the HP series apparently had a weird nybble-serial architecture called Saturn that worked on 64-bit values.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    While it didn't have Mario, the HP48GX did have an almost perfect clone of Phoenix. If it had been in color, I might have been convinced it was an emulation.
billfruit 7y ago
I doubt it does. Most of Asia you'd find Casio is the preferred brand, and TI, HP isn't even available. The Casio ones should be cheaper in the US too(they usually cost around 10$), I would think them very popular there as well, unless perhaps TI and HP has some kind of nerfarious link up with the Dept of Education to monopolize the market.
zozbot234 7y ago
As usual, xkcd https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/ is relevant.
samgranieri 7y ago
The first program I ever wrote was a quadratic equation solver on a TI-82. Fond memories. However, that was in the mid 90s. It's shocking those calculators are still around and cost that much.
jtlienwis 7y ago
I saw a youtube interviewing the guy that wrote the code for the HP-35. He said that David Packard got mad when he heard that every engineer in a certain division of HP was going to get their own HP-35. He said that one calculator could easily be shared among 4 or 5 people.
- __s 7y ago
  David Packard just wanted engineers to practice peer programming more
jhallenworld 7y ago
It's fun to find the cheapest scientific calculator possible. Here's one for $1: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.20f65e66p1pfoC&algo_pvid=f56f95ee-2a17-4eca-a0a3-e58c0caee983&algo_expid=f56f95ee-2a17-4eca-a0a3-e58c0caee983-33&btsid=103e61f1-2862-4bb7-852e-1728d3127f1e&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_1,searchweb201603_52 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
- chongli 7y ago
  Wow, that looks like a pretty exact clone of the Casio FX-350MS [1]. Apart from the colour scheme, the shape of the directional keys, and some of the lettering, they're identical. [1] https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/ https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/
  - flixic 7y ago
    Yeah, it's clearly a knockoff. They even borrowed the idea of having five red, dot-separated letters above the screen. S.U.P.E.R. probably means nothing, but if Casio has it, Kenko must have it too.
- knolax 7y ago
  But it's not a graphing calculator and also presumably nonprogrammable.
dwohnitmok 7y ago
As far as I can tell the TI graphing calculators are riding entirely off of mind share/familiarity, both among students and teachers, and teaching materials, which reinforces the former. Specifically textbooks and teacher training all use TI graphing calculators. Presumably tests are therefore made with the capabilities of a TI graphing calculator in mind. CollegeBoard actually has a wide range of calculators it allows for the SAT (https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-test/calculator-policy https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...), but very few test takers take advantage of this. TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi. Indeed an open source third party emulator already exists (https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu). Does anyone know what the legality of selling a calculator that is a dedicated emulator of a TI graphing calculator (not just an online one like Desmos, but a purpose-made physical calculator that does nothing else)? I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before. EDIT: I mean a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else but be a graphing calculator, e.g. not something on a smartphone.
- mdszy 7y ago
  > I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before. Probably for exactly the reason you're asking about: legality. There's no way that the licenses of the TI calculator software allow for this.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    IANAL but it's unclear to me why that would be illegal. See Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. [ADDED: Basically said it was OK for Borland to sell a spreadsheet with the same look and feel as Lotus 1-2-3.] What probably is true is that the work-alike would likely not be certified to be used on exams unless some company spent the money to do so and then they're not really incentivized to sell the calculator for cheap. The whole situation seems very path dependent. There's probably no particularly good reason why you even need a graphing calculator. It's just sort of become the default.
    - 7y ago
sanj 7y ago
My son's Eagle Scout project is to collect unused TI-83/4, rehab them, and give them away to the incoming students. If you have any kicking around, drop me email and I can fwd to him.
- ISL 7y ago
  That's an awesome Eagle Scout project. Addresses a real community need, leverages volunteer people-power, scales well, low risk. What an excellent choice. That can be readily-combined with fundraising canvassing, too. The Girl Scouts could pick that up with a drop-box at every cookie table...
billfruit 7y ago
I am always surprised in hearing that American students need a programmable, graphing calculator. In most of Asia such is not required, only a much cheaper 'scientfic' calculator, even for graduate courses in science and engineering. Some disciplines even in sciences/engineering, for example Computer Science, does not require any sort of calculator usually.
- haroldp 7y ago
  It's a relatively recent development. I majored in physics, and made it through differential equations in the 1990s without one. It's a requirement for my daughter's high school math class.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    It does does raise the question. Why do American highschoolers need it, and why not them in the rest of the world. Why saddle students and parents with an additional 100$+ expense, when very possibly it isn't strictly pedagogically necessary.
    - dboreham 7y ago
      For the most part "graphing calculator" seems to be a catch all term for "scientific calculator with the features we need" in that little actual graphing is done. But I have seen problems in my son's "Algebra 2" class that require plotting polynomials on the calculator then describing their roots, shape etc. As a way to build intuition about the geometric interpretation of functions, that seems like a reasonable approach although Wolfram alpha would do a decent job too.
      - edh649 7y ago
        In the UK we have similar questions of plotting and describing geometric functions, however we were simply taught how to plot them by hand, or just directly interrogate the equation to spot where an asymptote might be, roots etc. IMO this gives a much better inherent understanding of equations, rather than just plugging in some numbers into a calculator and reading what comes out.
twodave 7y ago
Monopoly or not, I would have not been able to be nearly as lazy in high school math (circa 2000-2003) if not for the ability to program all the formulae into my TI-82. At the time the chance to trade study hours for video games, soccer and guitar was precious to me beyond measure.
symplee 7y ago
Any know if there's an archive of TI-83 calculator games? (And, ideally, the ability to play them on the computer.)
- MayeulC 7y ago
  IIRC, TI-Planet has a lot of those, as well as emulators.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    Mostly in French, unfortunately. Games: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Jeux+z80 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Jeux+z80 A lot of emulators there: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Utilitaires+PC+z80 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Utilitaires... One of them is web-based: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=1414 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=1414 (also hosted online at brandonmeyer.net/projects/TI8XEmu/TI8XEmu.html but I can't access it now) Coming second as communities are Omnimaga, and ti-calc.org I feel like the only redeeming quality of these calculators is the community around them; and they make kids interested into programming and electronics. The landscape is looking better and better for who wants to hack his calculator. Of course, the most convenient emulator is offered by numworks for their calculator: it's right there, on their website: https://www.numworks.com/simulator/ https://www.numworks.com/simulator/
- hermitdev 7y ago
  http://ticalc.org http://ticalc.org used be my go-to site in the 90s. Still active, too, a post as recently as yesterday (2019-11-25). Lots of good games there. Also, a lot of Z80 assembly reference and links to emulators. If you like classic Super Mario, definitely checkout Penguins. There's also some Zelda clones, nibbles/snake. There used be a Monopoly clone, but that's gone. Allegedly the trademark owner (Parker Brothers at the time IIRC) went after the developer for trademark infringement and he had to take it down. But, rather than sue them, PB actually hired the dev to make the original Game Boy Monopoly game. No idea about the veracity of this, but just a vague recollection from the 90s. I actually still have my dead-tree Z80 instruct set reference manual sitting on my shelf at home next to my 68K manual. 2 of my oldest and well used programming references.
WillPostForFood 7y ago
Has math education actually improved with the introduction of calculators? Easy and equitable solution would be to remove them from classes and tests.
- knolax 7y ago
  Has introducing students to a programmable computer dedicated to math improved math education? Yes, yes it has. Writing a program to automate certain computations certainly helps your understanding better than performing said computations by rote multiple times.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    How often do high school students actually use graphing calculators to write programs? If it's only one day a year, then they can do that by going to the computer lab. I have doubts that graphing calculators provide any educational value except in rare instances. Are those rare instances worth every student having such an expensive thing for several years?
    - knolax 7y ago
      > How often do high school students actually use graphing calculators to write programs? In my experience that's where all the time saved by automating rote calculation went. Maybe this is a generational thing but for a lot of my peers Ti-84s were their first experience with programming. It's probably the only context where most students are exposed to computing that doesn't involve always connected data-harvesting. > going to the computer lab A student has no incentive to write programs if they aren't actually going to use them. > Are those rare instances worth every student having such an expensive thing for several years? I remember buying mine at a flea market for literally a quarter. TI-84s have been around for so long that they're really only expensive if you're hellbent on only buying new. Every garage sale and Goodwill in the country has at least one of these for cheap.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    How does it do that? It seems like graphing equations by hand on graph paper would help understanding better. And my personal experience tells me that rote practice increases task fluency. Do you have any citations to back up your claim?
ReptileMan 7y ago
Why do you even need a calculator for a math class? Plotting a graph is trivial. Calculating stuff too. Pen and paper, and eventually - a compass, ruler, protractor is all you need to understand high school math.
gorgoiler 7y ago
By ‘eck, when I were a lad we drew cumulative frequency curves and histograms by hand, and looked up statistical values in the back of a common formulae book. When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator. TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous. — Sent from my iPhone XS
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Anyone else use a slide rule in school? I have tried to explain it to my wife, but she can't grok it. I'm going to have to buy one from fleaBay to get her to understand.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Yep. I didn't have a calculator until college. There are online virtual slide rules like http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-es.html http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-e... The key concept is understanding how logarithms work.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    Never used it myself. I did engineering back 30 years ago and we learned in the engineering graphics course how to design nomographs which are similar to slide rules.
  - ubermonkey 7y ago
    Nope. Never even saw one used. I understand what it's FOR, but as a means of calculation they're obsolete. When I entered the workforce and met engineers much older (say, born 10+ years before I was in 1970), they'd often have one in a desk drawer, but they weren't using them either.
    - 7y ago
faissaloo 7y ago
I still fail to understand why they shouldn't just be allowed to use computers. This is a failure of the education system to adapt.
- Jtsummers 7y ago
  Part of the problem is affordability of $100 calculators for both the students and the educators. That problem remains, and is worse, if you want to get them to buy and use computers. However, this was partially addressed in the article. Phones (if students have them) have apps which make solving the math problems too easy, scan the problem and the steps and solution are displayed. So teachers can't permit them in the classroom if they eliminate the learning objective entirely. With regard to computers, though, Desmos [0] was spoken of in the article. They have apps for computers and phones, and they've made some headway with making the computer program available when students have mandatory tests that are already on computers. I don't think your judgement really makes sense, the education system is adapting. But it's a long process and the problem still remains, if educational materials and curricula require the use of technology, and the teachers and students can't afford it, then it's still a failure or sets up classes of people to fail due to lack of economic viability. [0] https://www.desmos.com/ https://www.desmos.com/
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    "Phones (if students have them) have apps which make solving the math problems too easy, scan the problem and the steps and solution are displayed" If teaching is obsoleted by technology then it is teaching that must change not the technology.
    - Jtsummers 7y ago
      The material is not obsoleted. We wouldn't say that literacy was useless because phones can read off everything to us. Why would we say the same about K-12 mathematics?
      - faissaloo 7y ago
mixedmath 7y ago
From my experience, calculators in classrooms have had a few interesting and odd effects on intuition and expectation. For years, classes were separated and had "theoretical" components without calculator use and "computational" components with calculator use. The computational parts would involve gross numbers with real-ish answers --- things don't work out so nicely. But the theory parts would always have very nice answers (if some sort of computation had to be done). It turns out that I came to expect theoretical aspects to always work out nicely; similarly, I often failed to see the light through the hairy parts of the computational parts. This came to the fore when I took an Ordinary Differential Equations / Calculus of Variations course. There were no calculators now --- when we needed computational power, we used various CAS. I remember being very confused the first time we showed a solution existed to some ODE, and then "found it" to any degree of precision we wanted. This was partly theory, but it was very imperfect! My mathematical intuition ended up sharpening strongly during that semester. Now I'm a number theorist. When I teach, I don't use calculators. I'm acutely aware, however, that early elementary number theory ends up being presented as a delightful and pure little topic. I think there is some need for continued computational aspects in math courses, but I haven't quite seen it done just right yet. (When I do incorporate computational aspects, it's either attached to a basic programming course or attached to an introductory sagemath CAS course).
- jacobolus 7y ago
  The computation of early (primary school) math courses could be done with a counting board, which is a type of general-purpose computer with memory consisting of buttons/coins and a human for a CPU. Later (high school / undergraduate coursework), it would be good to use a programming language like Python or Julia or Swift .... I also think students should spend at least a few weeks or months using a slide rule and printed tables for basic arithmetic, but more to learn about logarithms and mathematical history than to learn about computational mathematics per se.
siraben 7y ago
As someone who has just got out of the curriculum that enforces usage of the TI calculators, given the ubiquity of these devices, I wish it was used more in teaching students about low-level programming, hardware, etc. especially with older models such as the TI-84+ there's great hacking potential. Compared to programming on the modern software stack, the Z80 is minimal. Plus, who said it has to be in assembly? Forth would do! Some of my own hacking attempts: [1] https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80/ https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80/ [2] https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth/ https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth/
- tropo 7y ago
  You can go more mainstream with the TI-84 Plus CE. It has a C compiler.
carusooneliner 7y ago
My old company had the word 'Instruments' in its name but it was not a competitor to Texas Instruments. When I would meet people and tell them where I worked, they would often confuse it with TI. This was so widespread that my company made a t-shirt that had on it the slogan 'We don't make calculators.'
nullc 7y ago
It's too bad, because much nicer calculators can be made now, e.g. https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php
protomyth 7y ago
Its funny, that since the TI was allowed to be used during math tests, I thought it was only for school and I should get a "real" calculator from HP when I left school.
pjmlp 7y ago
On US. We never had restrictions, HP, Casio, TI, just bring your favourite one into the class.
tyingq 7y ago
Used, working, TI 83-Plus calculators are fairly cheap on eBay. Saw several for $27 to $35, shipped.
gourabmi 7y ago
I went to school in the 90-00s. We started off with log-table sheets at our high school. I bought a Casio FX-991ms at some point of time in the university. I still love that machine. It has moved along with me across thousands of miles. It works perfectly even after a decade.
BubRoss 7y ago
I'm surprised no one just clones TI-85 etc. from scratch. A small pcb, cheap switches and buttons, a cheap micro controller and cheap lcd screen is all you would need.
intrepidhero 7y ago
I had a TI-89 in school because having CAS in your pocket was just plain awesome. Besides, it was much cheaper than mathmatica. Interestingly once I got into higher level[1] stuff the abilities of your calculator were of much less importance. Really computational stuff was done on a computer (in the lab) and any math in class could be handled with a basic calculator. When I sat for the FE and PE (fundamentals and professional engineering exams) they require you to use a dumb calculator. No programmability allowed. https://ncees.org/exams/calculator/ https://ncees.org/exams/calculator/ [1] I have an electrical engineering degree from a US public university.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  I took the FE in 2003 in Illinois. All I took in was my basic scientific calculator (no programability or graphing). I was shocked when they turned around (against our pre-exam instructions) and allowed non-querty graphing calculators. I went through the first half with my scientific calc, then ran home at lunch to get my TI-89 for the second half. Thankfully I lived nearby the testing facility. Passed the FE on the first try. I've never taken the PE (have never worked under one for the required period).
shriphani 7y ago
You don't need a graphic calculator for high school. Hundreds of millions of kids in China and India graduate without one and do just fine. Differential calculus is now 400+ years old and generations of humans have done fine without a graphing calculator.
- Devagamster 7y ago
  It really does help though. As an understandability tool it is invaluable and can enable students to explore and gain intuitive understanding of concepts much faster.
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  Yes, but the tests effectively require them. For AP Calc there are what I called the "definite integral button" questions where you just have to identify that an integral is needed and plug in to your calculator, if you did it by hand you would take more than the intended time for that problem and get behind. Same for AP Stats, there wouldn't be time to run all the averages and deviations by hand. It's testing whether you know how to use the tool/what to tell your calculator to do. There's a calc inactive section on Calc that is basically what you are saying, but without the calc active section the scores would probably go way down.
  - eat_veggies 7y ago
    My experience with AP Stats was that it was more like "AP Calculator" because a good 80% of the test was about entering numbers into my TI84's lists and then picking the right stats functions to run. My textbook had more calculator tutorial than theory.
    - excalibur 7y ago
      I mean, that's a pretty accurate description of Statistics as a field.
      - bsder 7y ago
TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
I went to high school outside America. We not only did not have calculators, we were not allowed to use them in our tests. Why the hell does a math class need a calculator? And if you need a calculator, just allow a smartphone instead. Its a strange class indeed that forbids phones but allows calculators. What a precise way to thread requirements precisely to require more useless equipment. American schools are so annoying.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Tangential story: When I was in middle school, we had a computers class where we had a mock stock-buying competition. Each team of 4 students was given a pretend 10,000 dollars to invest in the market, and then we could buy/sell throughout the semester and whoever was left with the most equity would win. We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company... ...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.
- btrettel 7y ago
  My elementary school had a similar thing in (I believe) a math class I was in. I recall that we were given newspapers with a list of stock prices and were in groups. I can't recall if we were given any lesson on how the stock market worked. We had fairly little time to pick stocks. I'm not sure that I learned anything other than to actually know what you're doing if you're going to invest in random stocks.
  - vkou 7y ago
    The people whose lucky guesses paid off probably learned a different lesson.
peheje 7y ago
Sorry for offtopic. What is the best iOS alternative to ti89? Ever since leaving Android that is was I miss the most.
dkarl 7y ago
Standardization is inevitable. Teachers cannot and will not use calculators unless the module they are using (in the textbook or purchased separately) contains button by button instructions that work on the exact model of calculator used in their classroom. Something needs to be done to break the TI monopoly, though. There's no reason to pay that much for such primitive functionality, and the need for dedicated devices that can't be used to cheat won't go away.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Why "cannot"? I am not so completely old and my textbooks didn't take any particular model of calculator into account. Especially all the university math classes where it started to matter.
  - dkarl 7y ago
    Speaking of my high school teachers, some of them could, but enough of them needed to be walked through it themselves. We only used calculators with specially designed lesson plans. Most of the time they sat in plastic bins on the shelf. (I guess we were lucky that the school got grants to buy them.) It's possible that it's different now. When I was in high school, using graphing calculators was a new trend, and a lot of the teachers resented having to teach something they didn't learn in school.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
julienb_sea 7y ago
I love how the answer given to this problem is more funding. Such an indication of what's wrong with modern education. This entire article is exposing the TI monopoly on calculators, getting 85-90% profit margins, and our solution is to strike to get taxpayer money to keep paying for the things? We should encourage competition. Consider - an app that replicates this functionality on the phone, but tracks if the user at any point closes the app. This then is reported to the teacher so the teacher knows if there was any cheating.
- mc3 7y ago
  What about a government mandated price ceiling? Anyone can bid to be the official supplier or calculators, as long as they sell to the government wholesale at a maximum of $20 (or whatever is a good price).
  - joecool1029 7y ago
    With a price ceiling like that Casio would be pumping out calculators all day everyday just like F91W's.
- gowld 7y ago
  Here's an idea: Stop trying force the backwards notion that using tools is cheating. There is 0 reason that any high-stakes test needs a calculator. This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.
  - ddek 7y ago
    I understand that there are virtually no tests that _actually_ need a TI calculator. They're mad useful for learning - you can explore maths very effectively, but there's a learning curve to it. I started using GraphNCalc83 on my iPhone (maybe available on Android - I'm sure an alternative is if not), and I question the real need for a £120 calculator.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
djtriptych 7y ago
I honestly think I’m better at math / CS for going with an HP48G. RPN / stack based calculator. Drastically better construction. Luckily I went to a school district that allowed it.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Out-of-Band Story: I was at the Apple WWDC in the 1990s, where the guy demoed the graphing calculator app. He had been working on it as an unpaid "pseudo-hacker" for quite some time. He received a standing ovation. Don't you just love geeks?
- sgerenser 7y ago
  Interesting story about the Apple Graphing Calculator app that I probably saw here on HN a couple years ago: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/ https://www.pacifict.com/Story/
DonutATX 7y ago
What I fail to understand is this teachers assumption of financial responsibility for an expense outside their contract. What kind of union are they running? Seriously, if all of the teachers simply refused to purchase mandated equipment for their students, the district would either have to assume that responsibility, or change policy. By "doing the best for the students", the teacher allows the district to go unaccountable for their decisions, perpetuating the problem. I love teachers, family is full of them, and maybe they shouldn't allow themselves to be used so ruthlessly by the state?
- MandieD 7y ago
  As a Texas teacher's child, my answer is "what union"? TCTA (Texas Classroom Teachers' Association) appears to be toothless compared to the unions in other parts of the country: each year, my mom and every other teacher in her school district signed a blind contract that said that they could be sent to any school in the district, to teach any subject and grade level they were licensed for. In my mom's case, that could have been middle school elective Spanish (teach colors and numbers, sing fun songs, play Loteria, break up squabbling tweens), upper level high school Spanish (teach novels, mark essays, dealing with sophisticated language she hadn't since college) or 9th grade remedial US History (attempt to make surly teenagers remember important dates), the sort of change that could greatly expand her workload - hello, totally new lesson plans! Not letting the state treat them that way would require looking at how their colleagues up north manage to get tenure and long-term contracts. But that would involve being in a true union.
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
This same topic showed up on pol 3 weeks ago.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Trurl's Machine, by Stanislaw Lem Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. When it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint, trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped back, squinted, then added a little curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the forehead to be, a few pale orange polkadots. Extremely pleased with himself, he whistled an air and, as is always done on such occasions, asked it the ritual question of how much is two plus two. The machine stirred. Its tubes began to glow, its coils warmed up, current coursed through all its circuits like a waterfall, transformers hummed and throbbed, there was a clanging, and a chugging, and such an ungodly racket that Trurl began to think of adding a special mentation muffler. Meanwhile the machine labored on, as if it had been given the most difficult problem in the Universe to solve; the ground shook, the sand slid underfoot from the vibration, valves popped like champagne corks, the relays nearly gave way under the strain. At last, when Trurl had grown extremely impatient, the machine ground to a halt and said in a voice like thunder: SEVEN! [...] https://books.google.nl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&lpg=PT21&dq=%22Once+upon+a+time+Trurl+the+constructor+built+an+eight-story+thinking+machine%22&source=bl&ots=NqPvRaqdoh&sig=ACfU3U2sG1psPfMgDit_OaRuP24tA20AyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiu3KXXtInmAhUBjqQKHZMiD3sQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Once%20upon%20a%20time%20Trurl%20the%20constructor%20built%20an%20eight-story%20thinking%20machine%22&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&lpg=PT...
Johnny555 7y ago
Giving a child a four-function calculator would leave them woefully underprepared for the requirements of more advanced math and science classes. What math class requires a calculator? I still remember struggling with my Differential Equations class (got a D on the midterm), and my father said "Why is it so hard? You were always so great at arithmetic, just use a calculator!" At the time, a simple graphing calculator was high end (and out of my price range), nowadays I probably could do most of that homework with an equation solving smart app)
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  Staring with calculus I think, we had problems that basically tested our ability to use a graphing calculator. The classes are designed to use one, and trying to do so without would be very tedious.
MayeulC 7y ago
It might be a bit late to ask, but out of curiosity, what kind of tools are you using nowadays to replace calculators? I prefer free and open source ones, so I have a shortcut to open a terminal with GNU Octave (or python if not installed). I use xcas when I need CAS, but the interface is a bit unwieldy.
bonoboTP 7y ago
In our math classes in Hungary we could use any calculator we wanted, it doesn't cost too much to get one that can do trig functions and logarithm. One popular model was the Casio fx-82MS for $10-$20, but you can get cheaper models as well. And the "problem" that teachers would not know how your particular brand works sounds weird. There are so many ways to figure this out. I mean the student can read the manual. Or ask for help from fellow students. And our standardized secondary school graduation exam defines what you can do with calculators: > On solving the problems, you may use a calculator that cannot store and display textual information. You may also use any edition of the four-digit data tables. The use of any other electronic device or printed or written material is forbidden! > The use of calculators in the reasoning behind a particular solution may be accepted without further mathematical explanation in case of the following operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, calculating powers and roots, n!, n-choose-k, replacing the tables found in the 4-digit Data Booklet (sin, cos, tan, log, and their inverse functions), approximate values of the numbers π and e, finding the solutions of the standard quadratic equation. No further explanation is needed when the calculator is used to find the mean and the standard deviation, as long as the text of the question does not explicitly require the candidate to show detailed work. In any other cases, results obtained through the use of a calculator are considered as unexplained and points for such results will not be awarded. By the way these sheets are publicly available even in English, e.g. from Spring 2019: Basic level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tavasz_kozep/k_matang_19maj_fl.pdf http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav... Advanced level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tavasz_emelt/e_matang_19maj_fl.pdf http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav...
zkid18 7y ago
Any other example of consumers products that haven't improved dramatically for a couple decade and exist contrary to the technological progress? What comes to my mind - a great adoption of electronic dictionaries in Japan （電子辞書）. Many are Japanese who study English, find it more convenient.

211 points by lewisflude 7y ago

I can never be too mad at TI for this, since I'm only a programmer today because of a Ti-83+ and TI-BASIC Or at least that's what I thought about I got to the part about the guilt the author felt over the purchase, and the teacher trying to buy them out of pocket. It really is despicable that we require 100$+ purchase every student's education when there are so many realistic cheaper alternatives

umvi 7y ago
Shouldn't there be millions of used Ti-83s by now? Seems like there shouldn't be a real need to buy new when the market should be saturated with used. I know I have 2 Ti-83s in a box somewhere collecting dust. This could be solved with a simple sellback program. 1. Purchase from school for $100 2. Sell back for $95 3. Repeat forever until calculator breaks
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Do most people them them on to college as well though?
  - smachiz 7y ago
    I only needed a TI-83 in high school, but I think my college classed wanted me to buy a new TI-89. I still have my TI-89 in my office though I haven't used it ever... no idea where the TI-83 went.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - localhost8000 7y ago
    In my college experience, students weren't permitted to use graphing calculators in math classes, and other math-heavy classes (eg, physics, chemistry, etc) used simple math on exams and permitted laptops during labs/classwork.
    - krisgee 7y ago
      Same, the only time I used a TI graphing calculator was during one unit of high school math. I don't think we used them during the test for that semester either. The general rule was scientific calculator only.
  - NoInputSignal 7y ago
    I wasn't really a math person in grade school, but I remember needing a scientific calculator in middle school and a graphing calculator in highschool. When I got to college I retook the remedial math courses (starting with the equivelent of Algebra II) before I could take calculus (and the other math courses for a CS degree). Not a single professor of a math course let us use a graphing calculator, and infact, most had a "no calculator" policy. I never really put that together: you can learn the same curriculum with or without a calculator.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    The only time I was allowed to use a graphing calculator in college was a statistics class. My batteries actually crapped out right before the final and the professor was nice/trusting enough to let me use a TI-89 emulator on my phone.
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  There are tons of them already for sale cheaper, enough I don't think the overhead of running such a program would be justified: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+83 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+83 But there's concerted effort to keep the perceived value of used calculators from being too high from TI and their partners. Things like peripherals that only work with new devices for lab work, to textbook examples that rely on color (which only newer ones have). As soon as you go up a couple of levels in age you see the prices start to spike: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+nspire+cx https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+nspire+cx I say perceived value, because in reality the Ti-83 would still work for 99% of use cases, but TI has it's finger in the education pie, so it's easy for them to get textbooks to say things like "TI Nspire CX recommended" or have images and button presses that will only match their newest calculators
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    In reality a $5 “scientific calculator” (or a slide rule) works for 99% of use cases (high school math homework/exams). The only thing I know of which strictly needs the TI calculator is the AP calculus test. Students should just borrow a calculator a few times to prepare and then for a few hours for this single test. Getting them to spend $100 each to keep the calculator is a total racket. Better still would be to eliminate the need for a TI calculator from the AP exam, and then there would be no need for it whatsoever.
elwell 7y ago
I used to make games during class, then continue on the bus, and some more at home. Text input on that was quite slow though.
hermitdev 7y ago
That's sort of how I started programming, as well. First TI Basic, then Z80 assembly. I still have my TI-83 and TI-89 some 20 years after graduating. Also still have the parallel port link (not that I have a working computer with a parallel port anymore). When I was in HS, my teachers became wise to the existence of apps that would display the mem cleared message, so they would go around to each student and clear the memory themselves. This annoyed me as I'd written a lot of useful to me utilities (not cheats) and games, so I wrote a not-so-little program that emulated all of the system menus. You have to enter a hidden key combo to get out of it. Looking back at it, the code embarrasses me because it is so goddamn awful. I didn't know how to write functions or use the stack properly. It was just one giant mess of jumps and conditional branches. But hey, it worked. Sadly, I think all of my Z80 assembly is lost. I don't think I shared it on any sites, either.
DamnInteresting 7y ago
My very earliest programming experience was making games and math utilities on a TI-82 in the early 1990s. That little machine helped me cultivate skills that still pay my bills to this day.

ddevault 7y ago

Shamelessly posting an old project of mine: https://knightos.org https://knightos.org The build server has been dead for years, so you'll have to compile it yourself. If anyone's TI calculator is gathering dust in your closet, you might find this to be a fun hack to play with :)

dang 7y ago
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360757 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747729
- ddevault 7y ago
  2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630779 (June) 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990
  - dang 7y ago
    Ah yes!
ihuman 7y ago
On the download page, it says that, "KnightOS has no math or graphing support past a simple 4-operation calculator." Is that still the case?
- ddevault 7y ago
  Yes.
nexuist 7y ago
You did this! I remember posts about this on cemetech. Tiny world.

mkl 7y ago

They didn't in New Zealand; Casio did. Then students come to university and stop using them much - too limited and primitive compared to computers and smartphones, too powerful for the courses where we're trying to teach and assess analytical maths skills.

gfrangakis 7y ago

Why have no edtechs created a low cost version of the TI-83/84? One that mirrors the functionality of the TI calcs so that they can still be used with textbooks that are dependent on those. The article estimates the TI's cost $15-20 to make, but even that seems very high for what they are. I imagine the harder part is getting approval from the organizations that administer standardized tests like College Board and the states themselves.

aidenn0 7y ago
There are a lot of buttons. Those probably push the BOM up. If you switched to using a shitty membrane keypad you could probably save a lot of money.
- Slartie 7y ago
  If I remember the innards of my TI-83 correctly (I used it during school 15 years ago, added LED lighting to the display and tore it apart for that purpose) Texas Instruments already uses a shitty membrane keypad. At least I don't remember seeing lots of microswitches.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    It's possible. I'm old enough that I had an 82.
- buttonemuu 7y ago
  How are the buttons different from a $12 Casio fx-300ES for example?
- mkl 7y ago
  I don't think I've used a TI calculator (they're not in NZ much), but with the sole exception of my HP 48G every make and model of calculator I've used in the past 30+ years has used a crappy membrane keypad.
bitwize 7y ago
This is literally like asking why no biotechs have come in and disrupted, say, the CPAP machine market with lower cost alternatives. Calculators used in university entrance examinations must be approved and certified by THE COLLEGE BOARD™, who will only approve specific models and not workalikes. The stated reason for this is to prevent cheating, but as usual the creation of monopolies who can then charge what they like is a nice side benefit, if not the primary benefit.

bjornjaja 7y ago

Not related to the monopoly stuff but I like HP calculators best! For college I used an HP 35S—it’s a programmable scientific calculator and fun to program because it uses RPN stacks for calculations and storing results.

ghaff 7y ago
I always preferred the RPN HPs. I used an HP-55 through most of college. (I started with an early TI scientific calculator; I began university just as calculator prices were really dropping and discontinued HP models only became relatively affordable a little later.) Then I had a variety of other HPs over the years including an HP-41CV with a Financial Pac. Unfortunately, the modern "HP" calculators are not as well made or have as good a keyboard feel. (I actually didn't have a calculator until college.)
hvs 7y ago
Nothing beats my old HP-48G that I used in college. Unfortunately, HP has all but left that space and my HP 35S (yes, I do own one) is but a shadow of what HP calculators once were.
- mkl 7y ago
  Well, a 48GX would! (The same but with more RAM that's also expandable.) I have a 48G too, but nowadays I just use computers.
ubermonkey 7y ago
I have a 16C on my desk, fwiw.
macintux 7y ago
I had to hunt online for a used HP when I took a college class in 2003(ish) because the final exam needed a calculator and I honestly had no idea how to use non-RPN (I'm sure I could have figured it out, but been much slower). I'd been using RPN since high school.
- 7y ago

briffle 7y ago

In highschool, I had a TI-83, and had fun doing things like programming blackjack on it, so I could look like I was doing work while having fun. I went to an engineering school and switched to an HP-48GX for my years at it, and fell in love with the RPN input. I miss that calculator, but not the TI. I think I sold the HP 8 years after I bought it for $20 more than I bought it for. They were discontinued, and surveyors and others that had special modules that could plug into it would pay a premium for a replacement one.

klodolph 7y ago
I had a TI-86 and then won an HP-48GX. At some point the TI-86 was lost or stolen, I don’t care, the HP-48GX was so much better. I especially liked working with units, which made everything in science classes that much more convenient. The only thing I missed about the TI-86 was the Mario clone, with level editor, and a puzzle game called DStar. While the TI-83 and 86 had a pedestrian Z80, the HP series apparently had a weird nybble-serial architecture called Saturn that worked on 64-bit values.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  While it didn't have Mario, the HP48GX did have an almost perfect clone of Phoenix. If it had been in color, I might have been convinced it was an emulation.

billfruit 7y ago

I doubt it does. Most of Asia you'd find Casio is the preferred brand, and TI, HP isn't even available. The Casio ones should be cheaper in the US too(they usually cost around 10$), I would think them very popular there as well, unless perhaps TI and HP has some kind of nerfarious link up with the Dept of Education to monopolize the market.

zozbot234 7y ago

As usual, xkcd https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/ is relevant.

samgranieri 7y ago

The first program I ever wrote was a quadratic equation solver on a TI-82. Fond memories. However, that was in the mid 90s. It's shocking those calculators are still around and cost that much.

jtlienwis 7y ago

I saw a youtube interviewing the guy that wrote the code for the HP-35. He said that David Packard got mad when he heard that every engineer in a certain division of HP was going to get their own HP-35. He said that one calculator could easily be shared among 4 or 5 people.

__s 7y ago
David Packard just wanted engineers to practice peer programming more

jhallenworld 7y ago

It's fun to find the cheapest scientific calculator possible. Here's one for $1: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.20f65e66p1pfoC&algo_pvid=f56f95ee-2a17-4eca-a0a3-e58c0caee983&algo_expid=f56f95ee-2a17-4eca-a0a3-e58c0caee983-33&btsid=103e61f1-2862-4bb7-852e-1728d3127f1e&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_1,searchweb201603_52 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.p...

chongli 7y ago
Wow, that looks like a pretty exact clone of the Casio FX-350MS [1]. Apart from the colour scheme, the shape of the directional keys, and some of the lettering, they're identical. [1] https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/ https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/
- flixic 7y ago
  Yeah, it's clearly a knockoff. They even borrowed the idea of having five red, dot-separated letters above the screen. S.U.P.E.R. probably means nothing, but if Casio has it, Kenko must have it too.
knolax 7y ago
But it's not a graphing calculator and also presumably nonprogrammable.

dwohnitmok 7y ago

As far as I can tell the TI graphing calculators are riding entirely off of mind share/familiarity, both among students and teachers, and teaching materials, which reinforces the former. Specifically textbooks and teacher training all use TI graphing calculators. Presumably tests are therefore made with the capabilities of a TI graphing calculator in mind. CollegeBoard actually has a wide range of calculators it allows for the SAT (https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-test/calculator-policy https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...), but very few test takers take advantage of this. TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi. Indeed an open source third party emulator already exists (https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu). Does anyone know what the legality of selling a calculator that is a dedicated emulator of a TI graphing calculator (not just an online one like Desmos, but a purpose-made physical calculator that does nothing else)? I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before. EDIT: I mean a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else but be a graphing calculator, e.g. not something on a smartphone.

mdszy 7y ago
> I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before. Probably for exactly the reason you're asking about: legality. There's no way that the licenses of the TI calculator software allow for this.
- ghaff 7y ago
  IANAL but it's unclear to me why that would be illegal. See Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. [ADDED: Basically said it was OK for Borland to sell a spreadsheet with the same look and feel as Lotus 1-2-3.] What probably is true is that the work-alike would likely not be certified to be used on exams unless some company spent the money to do so and then they're not really incentivized to sell the calculator for cheap. The whole situation seems very path dependent. There's probably no particularly good reason why you even need a graphing calculator. It's just sort of become the default.
  - 7y ago

sanj 7y ago

My son's Eagle Scout project is to collect unused TI-83/4, rehab them, and give them away to the incoming students. If you have any kicking around, drop me email and I can fwd to him.

ISL 7y ago
That's an awesome Eagle Scout project. Addresses a real community need, leverages volunteer people-power, scales well, low risk. What an excellent choice. That can be readily-combined with fundraising canvassing, too. The Girl Scouts could pick that up with a drop-box at every cookie table...

billfruit 7y ago

I am always surprised in hearing that American students need a programmable, graphing calculator. In most of Asia such is not required, only a much cheaper 'scientfic' calculator, even for graduate courses in science and engineering. Some disciplines even in sciences/engineering, for example Computer Science, does not require any sort of calculator usually.

haroldp 7y ago
It's a relatively recent development. I majored in physics, and made it through differential equations in the 1990s without one. It's a requirement for my daughter's high school math class.
- billfruit 7y ago
  It does does raise the question. Why do American highschoolers need it, and why not them in the rest of the world. Why saddle students and parents with an additional 100$+ expense, when very possibly it isn't strictly pedagogically necessary.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    For the most part "graphing calculator" seems to be a catch all term for "scientific calculator with the features we need" in that little actual graphing is done. But I have seen problems in my son's "Algebra 2" class that require plotting polynomials on the calculator then describing their roots, shape etc. As a way to build intuition about the geometric interpretation of functions, that seems like a reasonable approach although Wolfram alpha would do a decent job too.
    - edh649 7y ago
      In the UK we have similar questions of plotting and describing geometric functions, however we were simply taught how to plot them by hand, or just directly interrogate the equation to spot where an asymptote might be, roots etc. IMO this gives a much better inherent understanding of equations, rather than just plugging in some numbers into a calculator and reading what comes out.

twodave 7y ago

Monopoly or not, I would have not been able to be nearly as lazy in high school math (circa 2000-2003) if not for the ability to program all the formulae into my TI-82. At the time the chance to trade study hours for video games, soccer and guitar was precious to me beyond measure.

symplee 7y ago

Any know if there's an archive of TI-83 calculator games? (And, ideally, the ability to play them on the computer.)

MayeulC 7y ago
IIRC, TI-Planet has a lot of those, as well as emulators.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Mostly in French, unfortunately. Games: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Jeux+z80 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Jeux+z80 A lot of emulators there: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Utilitaires+PC+z80 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Utilitaires... One of them is web-based: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=1414 https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=1414 (also hosted online at brandonmeyer.net/projects/TI8XEmu/TI8XEmu.html but I can't access it now) Coming second as communities are Omnimaga, and ti-calc.org I feel like the only redeeming quality of these calculators is the community around them; and they make kids interested into programming and electronics. The landscape is looking better and better for who wants to hack his calculator. Of course, the most convenient emulator is offered by numworks for their calculator: it's right there, on their website: https://www.numworks.com/simulator/ https://www.numworks.com/simulator/
hermitdev 7y ago
http://ticalc.org http://ticalc.org used be my go-to site in the 90s. Still active, too, a post as recently as yesterday (2019-11-25). Lots of good games there. Also, a lot of Z80 assembly reference and links to emulators. If you like classic Super Mario, definitely checkout Penguins. There's also some Zelda clones, nibbles/snake. There used be a Monopoly clone, but that's gone. Allegedly the trademark owner (Parker Brothers at the time IIRC) went after the developer for trademark infringement and he had to take it down. But, rather than sue them, PB actually hired the dev to make the original Game Boy Monopoly game. No idea about the veracity of this, but just a vague recollection from the 90s. I actually still have my dead-tree Z80 instruct set reference manual sitting on my shelf at home next to my 68K manual. 2 of my oldest and well used programming references.

WillPostForFood 7y ago

Has math education actually improved with the introduction of calculators? Easy and equitable solution would be to remove them from classes and tests.

knolax 7y ago
Has introducing students to a programmable computer dedicated to math improved math education? Yes, yes it has. Writing a program to automate certain computations certainly helps your understanding better than performing said computations by rote multiple times.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  How often do high school students actually use graphing calculators to write programs? If it's only one day a year, then they can do that by going to the computer lab. I have doubts that graphing calculators provide any educational value except in rare instances. Are those rare instances worth every student having such an expensive thing for several years?
  - knolax 7y ago
    > How often do high school students actually use graphing calculators to write programs? In my experience that's where all the time saved by automating rote calculation went. Maybe this is a generational thing but for a lot of my peers Ti-84s were their first experience with programming. It's probably the only context where most students are exposed to computing that doesn't involve always connected data-harvesting. > going to the computer lab A student has no incentive to write programs if they aren't actually going to use them. > Are those rare instances worth every student having such an expensive thing for several years? I remember buying mine at a flea market for literally a quarter. TI-84s have been around for so long that they're really only expensive if you're hellbent on only buying new. Every garage sale and Goodwill in the country has at least one of these for cheap.
- triceratops 7y ago
  How does it do that? It seems like graphing equations by hand on graph paper would help understanding better. And my personal experience tells me that rote practice increases task fluency. Do you have any citations to back up your claim?

ReptileMan 7y ago

Why do you even need a calculator for a math class? Plotting a graph is trivial. Calculating stuff too. Pen and paper, and eventually - a compass, ruler, protractor is all you need to understand high school math.

gorgoiler 7y ago

By ‘eck, when I were a lad we drew cumulative frequency curves and histograms by hand, and looked up statistical values in the back of a common formulae book. When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator. TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous. — Sent from my iPhone XS

reaperducer 7y ago
Anyone else use a slide rule in school? I have tried to explain it to my wife, but she can't grok it. I'm going to have to buy one from fleaBay to get her to understand.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Yep. I didn't have a calculator until college. There are online virtual slide rules like http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-es.html http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-e... The key concept is understanding how logarithms work.
- pkaye 7y ago
  Never used it myself. I did engineering back 30 years ago and we learned in the engineering graphics course how to design nomographs which are similar to slide rules.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  Nope. Never even saw one used. I understand what it's FOR, but as a means of calculation they're obsolete. When I entered the workforce and met engineers much older (say, born 10+ years before I was in 1970), they'd often have one in a desk drawer, but they weren't using them either.
  - 7y ago

faissaloo 7y ago

I still fail to understand why they shouldn't just be allowed to use computers. This is a failure of the education system to adapt.

Jtsummers 7y ago
Part of the problem is affordability of $100 calculators for both the students and the educators. That problem remains, and is worse, if you want to get them to buy and use computers. However, this was partially addressed in the article. Phones (if students have them) have apps which make solving the math problems too easy, scan the problem and the steps and solution are displayed. So teachers can't permit them in the classroom if they eliminate the learning objective entirely. With regard to computers, though, Desmos [0] was spoken of in the article. They have apps for computers and phones, and they've made some headway with making the computer program available when students have mandatory tests that are already on computers. I don't think your judgement really makes sense, the education system is adapting. But it's a long process and the problem still remains, if educational materials and curricula require the use of technology, and the teachers and students can't afford it, then it's still a failure or sets up classes of people to fail due to lack of economic viability. [0] https://www.desmos.com/ https://www.desmos.com/
- faissaloo 7y ago
  "Phones (if students have them) have apps which make solving the math problems too easy, scan the problem and the steps and solution are displayed" If teaching is obsoleted by technology then it is teaching that must change not the technology.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    The material is not obsoleted. We wouldn't say that literacy was useless because phones can read off everything to us. Why would we say the same about K-12 mathematics?
    - faissaloo 7y ago

mixedmath 7y ago

From my experience, calculators in classrooms have had a few interesting and odd effects on intuition and expectation. For years, classes were separated and had "theoretical" components without calculator use and "computational" components with calculator use. The computational parts would involve gross numbers with real-ish answers --- things don't work out so nicely. But the theory parts would always have very nice answers (if some sort of computation had to be done). It turns out that I came to expect theoretical aspects to always work out nicely; similarly, I often failed to see the light through the hairy parts of the computational parts. This came to the fore when I took an Ordinary Differential Equations / Calculus of Variations course. There were no calculators now --- when we needed computational power, we used various CAS. I remember being very confused the first time we showed a solution existed to some ODE, and then "found it" to any degree of precision we wanted. This was partly theory, but it was very imperfect! My mathematical intuition ended up sharpening strongly during that semester. Now I'm a number theorist. When I teach, I don't use calculators. I'm acutely aware, however, that early elementary number theory ends up being presented as a delightful and pure little topic. I think there is some need for continued computational aspects in math courses, but I haven't quite seen it done just right yet. (When I do incorporate computational aspects, it's either attached to a basic programming course or attached to an introductory sagemath CAS course).

jacobolus 7y ago
The computation of early (primary school) math courses could be done with a counting board, which is a type of general-purpose computer with memory consisting of buttons/coins and a human for a CPU. Later (high school / undergraduate coursework), it would be good to use a programming language like Python or Julia or Swift .... I also think students should spend at least a few weeks or months using a slide rule and printed tables for basic arithmetic, but more to learn about logarithms and mathematical history than to learn about computational mathematics per se.

siraben 7y ago

As someone who has just got out of the curriculum that enforces usage of the TI calculators, given the ubiquity of these devices, I wish it was used more in teaching students about low-level programming, hardware, etc. especially with older models such as the TI-84+ there's great hacking potential. Compared to programming on the modern software stack, the Z80 is minimal. Plus, who said it has to be in assembly? Forth would do! Some of my own hacking attempts: [1] https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80/ https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80/ [2] https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth/ https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth/

tropo 7y ago
You can go more mainstream with the TI-84 Plus CE. It has a C compiler.

carusooneliner 7y ago

My old company had the word 'Instruments' in its name but it was not a competitor to Texas Instruments. When I would meet people and tell them where I worked, they would often confuse it with TI. This was so widespread that my company made a t-shirt that had on it the slogan 'We don't make calculators.'

nullc 7y ago

It's too bad, because much nicer calculators can be made now, e.g. https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php

protomyth 7y ago

Its funny, that since the TI was allowed to be used during math tests, I thought it was only for school and I should get a "real" calculator from HP when I left school.

pjmlp 7y ago

On US. We never had restrictions, HP, Casio, TI, just bring your favourite one into the class.

tyingq 7y ago

Used, working, TI 83-Plus calculators are fairly cheap on eBay. Saw several for $27 to $35, shipped.

gourabmi 7y ago

I went to school in the 90-00s. We started off with log-table sheets at our high school. I bought a Casio FX-991ms at some point of time in the university. I still love that machine. It has moved along with me across thousands of miles. It works perfectly even after a decade.

BubRoss 7y ago

I'm surprised no one just clones TI-85 etc. from scratch. A small pcb, cheap switches and buttons, a cheap micro controller and cheap lcd screen is all you would need.

intrepidhero 7y ago

I had a TI-89 in school because having CAS in your pocket was just plain awesome. Besides, it was much cheaper than mathmatica. Interestingly once I got into higher level[1] stuff the abilities of your calculator were of much less importance. Really computational stuff was done on a computer (in the lab) and any math in class could be handled with a basic calculator. When I sat for the FE and PE (fundamentals and professional engineering exams) they require you to use a dumb calculator. No programmability allowed. https://ncees.org/exams/calculator/ https://ncees.org/exams/calculator/ [1] I have an electrical engineering degree from a US public university.

hermitdev 7y ago
I took the FE in 2003 in Illinois. All I took in was my basic scientific calculator (no programability or graphing). I was shocked when they turned around (against our pre-exam instructions) and allowed non-querty graphing calculators. I went through the first half with my scientific calc, then ran home at lunch to get my TI-89 for the second half. Thankfully I lived nearby the testing facility. Passed the FE on the first try. I've never taken the PE (have never worked under one for the required period).

shriphani 7y ago

You don't need a graphic calculator for high school. Hundreds of millions of kids in China and India graduate without one and do just fine. Differential calculus is now 400+ years old and generations of humans have done fine without a graphing calculator.

Devagamster 7y ago
It really does help though. As an understandability tool it is invaluable and can enable students to explore and gain intuitive understanding of concepts much faster.
morpheuskafka 7y ago
Yes, but the tests effectively require them. For AP Calc there are what I called the "definite integral button" questions where you just have to identify that an integral is needed and plug in to your calculator, if you did it by hand you would take more than the intended time for that problem and get behind. Same for AP Stats, there wouldn't be time to run all the averages and deviations by hand. It's testing whether you know how to use the tool/what to tell your calculator to do. There's a calc inactive section on Calc that is basically what you are saying, but without the calc active section the scores would probably go way down.
- eat_veggies 7y ago
  My experience with AP Stats was that it was more like "AP Calculator" because a good 80% of the test was about entering numbers into my TI84's lists and then picking the right stats functions to run. My textbook had more calculator tutorial than theory.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    I mean, that's a pretty accurate description of Statistics as a field.
    - bsder 7y ago

TheMagicHorsey 7y ago

I went to high school outside America. We not only did not have calculators, we were not allowed to use them in our tests. Why the hell does a math class need a calculator? And if you need a calculator, just allow a smartphone instead. Its a strange class indeed that forbids phones but allows calculators. What a precise way to thread requirements precisely to require more useless equipment. American schools are so annoying.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

Tangential story: When I was in middle school, we had a computers class where we had a mock stock-buying competition. Each team of 4 students was given a pretend 10,000 dollars to invest in the market, and then we could buy/sell throughout the semester and whoever was left with the most equity would win. We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company... ...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.

btrettel 7y ago
My elementary school had a similar thing in (I believe) a math class I was in. I recall that we were given newspapers with a list of stock prices and were in groups. I can't recall if we were given any lesson on how the stock market worked. We had fairly little time to pick stocks. I'm not sure that I learned anything other than to actually know what you're doing if you're going to invest in random stocks.
- vkou 7y ago
  The people whose lucky guesses paid off probably learned a different lesson.

peheje 7y ago

Sorry for offtopic. What is the best iOS alternative to ti89? Ever since leaving Android that is was I miss the most.

dkarl 7y ago

Standardization is inevitable. Teachers cannot and will not use calculators unless the module they are using (in the textbook or purchased separately) contains button by button instructions that work on the exact model of calculator used in their classroom. Something needs to be done to break the TI monopoly, though. There's no reason to pay that much for such primitive functionality, and the need for dedicated devices that can't be used to cheat won't go away.

maxerickson 7y ago
Why "cannot"? I am not so completely old and my textbooks didn't take any particular model of calculator into account. Especially all the university math classes where it started to matter.
- dkarl 7y ago
  Speaking of my high school teachers, some of them could, but enough of them needed to be walked through it themselves. We only used calculators with specially designed lesson plans. Most of the time they sat in plastic bins on the shelf. (I guess we were lucky that the school got grants to buy them.) It's possible that it's different now. When I was in high school, using graphing calculators was a new trend, and a lot of the teachers resented having to teach something they didn't learn in school.

deleted 7y ago

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julienb_sea 7y ago

I love how the answer given to this problem is more funding. Such an indication of what's wrong with modern education. This entire article is exposing the TI monopoly on calculators, getting 85-90% profit margins, and our solution is to strike to get taxpayer money to keep paying for the things? We should encourage competition. Consider - an app that replicates this functionality on the phone, but tracks if the user at any point closes the app. This then is reported to the teacher so the teacher knows if there was any cheating.

mc3 7y ago
What about a government mandated price ceiling? Anyone can bid to be the official supplier or calculators, as long as they sell to the government wholesale at a maximum of $20 (or whatever is a good price).
- joecool1029 7y ago
  With a price ceiling like that Casio would be pumping out calculators all day everyday just like F91W's.
gowld 7y ago
Here's an idea: Stop trying force the backwards notion that using tools is cheating. There is 0 reason that any high-stakes test needs a calculator. This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.
- ddek 7y ago
  I understand that there are virtually no tests that _actually_ need a TI calculator. They're mad useful for learning - you can explore maths very effectively, but there's a learning curve to it. I started using GraphNCalc83 on my iPhone (maybe available on Android - I'm sure an alternative is if not), and I question the real need for a £120 calculator.
  - jacobolus 7y ago

djtriptych 7y ago

I honestly think I’m better at math / CS for going with an HP48G. RPN / stack based calculator. Drastically better construction. Luckily I went to a school district that allowed it.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Out-of-Band Story: I was at the Apple WWDC in the 1990s, where the guy demoed the graphing calculator app. He had been working on it as an unpaid "pseudo-hacker" for quite some time. He received a standing ovation. Don't you just love geeks?

sgerenser 7y ago
Interesting story about the Apple Graphing Calculator app that I probably saw here on HN a couple years ago: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/ https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

DonutATX 7y ago

What I fail to understand is this teachers assumption of financial responsibility for an expense outside their contract. What kind of union are they running? Seriously, if all of the teachers simply refused to purchase mandated equipment for their students, the district would either have to assume that responsibility, or change policy. By "doing the best for the students", the teacher allows the district to go unaccountable for their decisions, perpetuating the problem. I love teachers, family is full of them, and maybe they shouldn't allow themselves to be used so ruthlessly by the state?

MandieD 7y ago
As a Texas teacher's child, my answer is "what union"? TCTA (Texas Classroom Teachers' Association) appears to be toothless compared to the unions in other parts of the country: each year, my mom and every other teacher in her school district signed a blind contract that said that they could be sent to any school in the district, to teach any subject and grade level they were licensed for. In my mom's case, that could have been middle school elective Spanish (teach colors and numbers, sing fun songs, play Loteria, break up squabbling tweens), upper level high school Spanish (teach novels, mark essays, dealing with sophisticated language she hadn't since college) or 9th grade remedial US History (attempt to make surly teenagers remember important dates), the sort of change that could greatly expand her workload - hello, totally new lesson plans! Not letting the state treat them that way would require looking at how their colleagues up north manage to get tenure and long-term contracts. But that would involve being in a true union.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

This same topic showed up on pol 3 weeks ago.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Trurl's Machine, by Stanislaw Lem Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. When it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint, trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped back, squinted, then added a little curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the forehead to be, a few pale orange polkadots. Extremely pleased with himself, he whistled an air and, as is always done on such occasions, asked it the ritual question of how much is two plus two. The machine stirred. Its tubes began to glow, its coils warmed up, current coursed through all its circuits like a waterfall, transformers hummed and throbbed, there was a clanging, and a chugging, and such an ungodly racket that Trurl began to think of adding a special mentation muffler. Meanwhile the machine labored on, as if it had been given the most difficult problem in the Universe to solve; the ground shook, the sand slid underfoot from the vibration, valves popped like champagne corks, the relays nearly gave way under the strain. At last, when Trurl had grown extremely impatient, the machine ground to a halt and said in a voice like thunder: SEVEN! [...] https://books.google.nl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&lpg=PT21&dq=%22Once+upon+a+time+Trurl+the+constructor+built+an+eight-story+thinking+machine%22&source=bl&ots=NqPvRaqdoh&sig=ACfU3U2sG1psPfMgDit_OaRuP24tA20AyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiu3KXXtInmAhUBjqQKHZMiD3sQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Once%20upon%20a%20time%20Trurl%20the%20constructor%20built%20an%20eight-story%20thinking%20machine%22&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&lpg=PT...

Johnny555 7y ago

Giving a child a four-function calculator would leave them woefully underprepared for the requirements of more advanced math and science classes. What math class requires a calculator? I still remember struggling with my Differential Equations class (got a D on the midterm), and my father said "Why is it so hard? You were always so great at arithmetic, just use a calculator!" At the time, a simple graphing calculator was high end (and out of my price range), nowadays I probably could do most of that homework with an equation solving smart app)

boomboomsubban 7y ago
Staring with calculus I think, we had problems that basically tested our ability to use a graphing calculator. The classes are designed to use one, and trying to do so without would be very tedious.

MayeulC 7y ago

It might be a bit late to ask, but out of curiosity, what kind of tools are you using nowadays to replace calculators? I prefer free and open source ones, so I have a shortcut to open a terminal with GNU Octave (or python if not installed). I use xcas when I need CAS, but the interface is a bit unwieldy.

bonoboTP 7y ago

In our math classes in Hungary we could use any calculator we wanted, it doesn't cost too much to get one that can do trig functions and logarithm. One popular model was the Casio fx-82MS for $10-$20, but you can get cheaper models as well. And the "problem" that teachers would not know how your particular brand works sounds weird. There are so many ways to figure this out. I mean the student can read the manual. Or ask for help from fellow students. And our standardized secondary school graduation exam defines what you can do with calculators: > On solving the problems, you may use a calculator that cannot store and display textual information. You may also use any edition of the four-digit data tables. The use of any other electronic device or printed or written material is forbidden! > The use of calculators in the reasoning behind a particular solution may be accepted without further mathematical explanation in case of the following operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, calculating powers and roots, n!, n-choose-k, replacing the tables found in the 4-digit Data Booklet (sin, cos, tan, log, and their inverse functions), approximate values of the numbers π and e, finding the solutions of the standard quadratic equation. No further explanation is needed when the calculator is used to find the mean and the standard deviation, as long as the text of the question does not explicitly require the candidate to show detailed work. In any other cases, results obtained through the use of a calculator are considered as unexplained and points for such results will not be awarded. By the way these sheets are publicly available even in English, e.g. from Spring 2019: Basic level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tavasz_kozep/k_matang_19maj_fl.pdf http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav... Advanced level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tavasz_emelt/e_matang_19maj_fl.pdf http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav...

zkid18 7y ago

Any other example of consumers products that haven't improved dramatically for a couple decade and exist contrary to the technological progress? What comes to my mind - a great adoption of electronic dictionaries in Japan （電子辞書）. Many are Japanese who study English, find it more convenient.