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Its a great mystery to me why American students have to buy expensive programmable calculators for course work. I vaguely remember reading that it is the resul
by publicola1990 5y ago
Its a great mystery to me why American students have to buy expensive programmable calculators for course work. I vaguely remember reading that it is the result of lobbying by calculator manufacturers.
In my country even undergraduate science/engineering students dont need a programmable calculator. Some undergraduate programs like CS don't need any type of calculator.
- sgt 5y agoThey are not expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator-White/dp/B00154GSQA https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator-...
- publicola1990 5y agoMore than the quantum of the expense, I am questioning the need. Couple of hundred dollars on an unnecessary expense is still wastage.
- sgt 5y agoBut for Calculus (part of CS) you need a graphing calculator.
- Jolter 5y agoYou don’t, unless the teaching staff decide to include a lot of numerical work in exams. Which I don’t know why they would do. I would presume that a calculus course would teach you algebraic methods that you work out on paper. In Swedish engineering schools, graphing calculators are banned from exams in almost all subject.
- ithinkso 5y agoWhy? I've done calculus and analysis in college and no one has ever used a calculator, I'm not even sure what you would need one for, can you give me an example (seriously curious) The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education was some circuit theory because those Thevenins and Nortons get real ugly real fast (but even then you only need +,-,*,/)
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThis is not calculus specific, but how did you look up logarithms? With printed tables??
- ithinkso 5y agoThe same way as pi, e and other constants, log(17) is just that. I never had to convert them to some decimal approximation in calculus classes Edit: Ok, I remember now there was a statistics exam when we had something like Student's t-distribution tabulated on the exam sheet but I had to scrape my brain to find an example, it does happen though
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education I’m not asking about calculus classes. You specifically said “my entire education” So you never needed to convert log(17) to decimal in your entire education? Or you just converted it by hand like the Neanderthals did?
- publicola1990 5y agoYou don't need a 100+£ programmable calculator for calculating log(17).
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoHe didn't mention 100+£ or any price. He said he never used a calculator in college -- even a 5£ calculator.
- ithinkso 5y agoNot on a piece of paper, no. Of course I had to at some point but in those instances I was at a computer anyway so I just used excel/python/matlab what have you, not a calculator like a Neanderthal
- publicola1990 5y agoWhy? Calculus is primarily used and taught analytically in maths & cs courses in my country.
- knolax 5y agoI got mine for 25 cents. They're fun.