9 ms·

In the world of Matlab, python, Octave and Wolfram Alpha, why bother with the TI-83 still?

• slezyr 6y ago
  “A lot of [TI’s] graphing calculator success was due to really aggressive lobbying for certain policies,” a source in the education space told The Hustle. “They made it so that that the types of things you were allowed to bring into a test were essentially limited to their devices.” https://thehustle.co/graphing-calculators-expensive/ https://thehustle.co/graphing-calculators-expensive/ And this step might be the reason why they do this now to make it impossible to cheat by using them with custom software. It provides them an argument why students can continue to use them on the tests.
  • mrkstu 6y ago
    And simultaneously remove old versions from the re-sale market that they have to compete against, since of course, they aren't secure.
• scottLobster 6y ago
  Because schools aren't about to let students use phones/laptops during exams, and not every student has readily available access to the internet. Also on occasion I need to do some simple plotting/multi-step math and my old high school TI-83 in the desk drawer is simply more convenient than firing up a Mathematics suite and looking up the arcane commands to get it to show what I actually want. But for professional use, yeah there are better tools.
  • oldsklgdfth 6y ago
    > Because schools aren't about to let students use phones/laptops during exams I was totally blown away when I entered a US high school only to find that math class was basically teaching you how to use the calculator, not how to do that math.
    • kube-system 6y ago
      This was not my experience in a US high school. We weren't permitted to use calculators until we demonstrated paper-and-pencil proficiency with a topic, and we always had to show each step of our work. But education is mostly regulated by state and local authorities in the US, so YMMV.
      • oldsklgdfth 6y ago
        > demonstrated paper-and-pencil proficiency with a topic That was my experience in Europe, but without moving to a calculator. I attended a public east coast high school.
        • scottLobster 6y ago
          School quality in the US is very location dependent, as public schools are largely funded by property taxes. I also went to a public east coast high school, and calculator use was mixed. Some exams allowed calculators, others not. Often the exam was designed such that it was testing your knowledge of a concept more than the numerically correct answer, showing work was required. So a calculator was useful for checking answers but correct answers with no work would get you a 20% at best.
          • avhon1 6y ago
            > School quality in the US is very location dependent, as public schools are largely funded by property taxes Also because curricula are designated at the state level, and teacher certification requirements vary by state and county.
        • kube-system 6y ago
          I think never using a calculator is just as misguided as always using one would be. Using a calculator is a skill in and of itself.
          • oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  • chongli 6y ago
    That's silly. None of my (I'm a math major) university calculus courses (calc 1, calc 2, calc 3, differential equations) allowed calculators on quizzes or exams. Graphing calculators are a zombie technology kept alive by completely bogus, artificial means. There's no reason to use a calculator on a properly-designed calculus exam. We were doing everything from Taylor series to triple integrals without them. Teaching kids to rely on a calculator from a young age severely limits their ability to develop the basic arithmetic "muscle memory" (for lack of a better term) needed to manipulate equations quickly in more advanced math classes. It's a real shame.
    • drdaeman 6y ago
      But what's the value of this arithmetic muscle memory, in a world of ubiquitous computing? As long as you don't treat this computing as magic that somehow solves your math problems (hah, true I was guilty of that when I was a school kid), but is fully aware about how it does it (the algorithm) and just let the machine do the boring bits.
      • jeffbee 6y ago
        Are you joking? Number sense is hugely useful in daily life. What if I have a recipe for three servings but five dinner guests? If I just passed milepost 472 and I average 55 miles per hour, how long will it take me to reach Mexico? How many bottled liters of water can I fit in this box? How much is the 1.35% annual property tax on a million-dollar house, per month? You really want to whip out your laptop for all that?
        • dTal 6y ago
          >How much is the 1.35% annual property tax on a million-dollar house, per month? You really want to whip out your laptop for all that? I'll bite. In what scenario would it be useful to do this calculation in my head?
          • jeffbee 6y ago
            You're trying to figure out if you can afford that house based on your monthly pay?
• saagarjha 6y ago
  Aside from the other examples brought up, pulling up an actual, physical calculator and typing into that can sometimes be faster and easier than using computer tools.
  • lasagnaphil 6y ago
    But one thing I don’t really understand is (as someone outside the US) ... how do you really type code (like BASIC) with that thing? The ones I’ve seen had really weird alphabet layouts, and I couldn’t understand how can students be able to be productive with such a finicky device.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Code is somewhat annoying to type, but when you're a bored high schooler with nothing else to do in class you might as well go through the two menus to type out the TI-BASIC commands.
    • vulcan01 6y ago
      They have computer software for Windows & Mac so you can connect your calculator to your computer and write code like that, but it is a pain to set up.
      • avhon1 6y ago
        The TI-84 and newer have USB ports, but the TI-83+ and older require a special cable to connect to a desktop computer. (USB-A or RS-232 on one end, a logic board in the middle, and a 3.5mm jack on the calculator end.) I never had one of those, so I entered everything via the keyboard. It must have been an experience very similar to my dad's, who copied BASIC programs out of Compute! magazines into his Atari 800XL in the 80's.
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      The last time I used an 83/84, all the functions and keywords were strictly token-based, so you went into menus to pick them out. Variable names and strings were directly typed, using one of the modifier keys. The 89 let you either type the names of functions or get them out of menus at your leisure. It's not the best experience in the world, but it's not significantly worse than typing on a touch screen. Remember that people tolerated typing on phone keypads for years, and this beats that by a mile.
• zozbot234 6y ago
  Calculator-like platforms are still very useful. A cheap microcontroller-class CPU and a tiny LCD or e-paper display can perform useful work whilst being highly energy-efficient, which is important for something that's as portable as a calculator and has to rely on battery power.
• dTal 6y ago
  Don't underestimate the value of having a useful, programmable microcomputer as a ubiquitous element of education. These calculators are (were) a portal to computing, accessible in a way unmatched by any heavyweight system. What RaspberryPi, MicroBIT, PocketC.H.I.P etc were all trying to achieve, TI calculators (practically inadvertantly!) achieved to a level of success undreamt of by those systems. Every student in high school owned a BASIC terminal. That's huge.
  • Mirioron 6y ago
    But people who set education policy or companies that lobby for education policy aren't in it to teach kids new things.
• avhon1 6y ago
  When I was in High school (in the early 2010's), I certainly didn't have room for a laptop or tablet on my desk! Just a notebook or binder would fill most of the available area, with room for an eraser and spare pen or pencil along the top edge. My calculator would sit on either the left or right page of my notebook, whichever I wasn't writing on at the moment. The textbook would be open in my lap. The only way a laptop or tablet would have fit would have been to either have my notebook over the keyboard and touchpad, do away with the notebook and do all work digitally, or do away with the physical textbook and put it on the laptop. My experience with e-learning and e-textbook platforms suggests that I very strongly recommend against the latter two options. --- Off the top of my head, a few more reasons: Although TI's calculators are expensive ($100-$150 each, depending on the model), they are cheaper than almost all devices that can run Matlab, Octave, etc. The dirt-cheapest of Android devices are cheaper to buy, but have higher administrative requirements, are probably too slow to run CAS well anyway. Calculators are much sturdier than smartphones, tablets, or laptops. Frangible case, thick ABS shells, rounded edges, low-tech big-pixel LCD. Calculators are subject to, and withstand, a great deal of use, neglect, and outright vandalism at the hands of teenagers. Tossed in backpacks, dropped onto floors or sidewalks, sharpied, spray-painted, engraved with anything available... The calculators survive this environment pretty well; it is entirely possible and reasonable for a student to be given and use a ten or even twenty-year-old calculator in class. Not only physically enduring, the calculators remain relevant for long periods of time. Even though TI has released new models since the TI-83, many classes will allow any calculator in the family. Some students will have brand-new instances of the latest model, some will have hand-me-down or secondhand calculators, and other students will use loaner calculators from a fleet that the school has retained for years. Maintaining such a fleet is far cheaper and easier than maintaining a fleet of up-to-date, secure, and working laptops or tablets. Calculators require less charging than laptops or tablets. A cheap quartet of AAA batteries can last a semester, or even a whole school year, in a calculator. If the batteries do die at a bad time, teachers will often have a stash of extras that can be swapped in by the student, allowing them to finish the class or exam. Tablets or laptops require banks of chargers, usually on mobile carts, and all of the cables need to be properly plugged in every afternoon, and sometimes before then. Any failure will result in a student who has to switch to an entirely new device (if one is available at all) in order to keep working. Calculators are instantaneous-on. You don't need to wait agonizing minutes of valuable class time for the OS to boot, the network to connect, typing a username/password, loading the desktop, and launching a CAS program. At best, that process could take only a few seconds. At worst, it could take many minutes. Anecdote: halfway through one of my semesters of high school, some of the school computers (including one I was assigned to) were updated from Windows XP to Windows 7. The login system recreated your profile from scratch at every login. The result was that it took about ten minutes every day just for me and the 6 or 7 other guinea-pig students to log in to our computers -- a big impediment in a computer graphics class, in a school where classes were only 47 minutes long. Calculators always work, and they always work the same way. They don't have mandatory security updates, certificate expirations, obsolete network configurations, missing user profiles, misconfigured product key servers, surprise UI updates, cloud-only functionality, or anything else like that. If it turns on, it works, and is exactly the same as it always has been. Another anecdote: In college, my ios app class was thrown in to disarray when we came in and found out that the university had updated to the latest version of xcode. The new IDE also came with a new version of swift. Our project was due later that week, and none of our code would compile. The instructors had to push the deadline back and create a "what we told you last week is different now" lecture the next day. Calculators are much less of a classroom distraction. Even though they can have third-party applications and games installed on them, they have an overridingly clear purpose: to perform calculations. Doing anything else on a graphing calculator is tedious and difficult. Calculators can only communicate by wire, have no sound, and have smaller (and usually un-backlit black-and-white) displays pointing straight up from the desk, so they can't really engage/distract more than one student. Contrast with laptops or tablets, which students know are able to browse the internet, watch videos, and engage socially with their peers. Even though the devices can be "secured", the value of workarounds is much greater than for calculators. Savy students will spend more effort developing workarounds for internet-capable devices, and their peers will jump through more hoops to perform them. When workarounds are in place, their use can also be much more distracting than a calculator: students covertly chatting in class, playing flashy games, or having sound play out the speakers.
• centimeter 6y ago
  Because school policy is driven mostly by lobbying and tradition, not by careful consideration of the best available options.