Yah, we don't use calculators much, either. Graphing calculators used to be nice to occasionally use to help build an intuitive sense of the "shape" of a funct

Yah, we don't use calculators much, either. Graphing calculators used to be nice to occasionally use to help build an intuitive sense of the "shape" of a function. Now I often use Desmos for the same thing. I was a long term sub for 8th grade science a couple years ago. It was fun to use Desmos for linear regression as they collected data points-- to see how each point changed the line of best fit before these students had learned L.R. in any rigorous way themselves. It made students excited to get each next point in our experiment and make predictions about whether they believe the line, etc. (And whether we can safely extrapolate past the data we have...) In the competitive math series I coach, one of the 3 rounds allows calculator usage. Usually using the calculator is a trap instead of doing something clever, but sometimes the calculator is the best way. I think it's kind of neat that they built it this way, because it requires building the intuition to realize whether you're really facing a problem that is purely calculation.