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The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: outdated calculator holds a monopoly on classrooms

6 points by indigodaddy 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
TI-89 was / is amazing for doing calculus for you :) Incredible how much staying power the TI-8x series has, more than 25 years of market dominance. Is this because they're really that good or due to schools controlling the situation by banning (or otherwise not supporting) other highly capable calculators?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > Is this because they're really that good or due to schools controlling the situation by banning (or otherwise not supporting) other highly capable calculators? It's the latter, but note that it's because of the College Board, not any individual schools. It's basically impossible to launch a competing calculator since there's a whitelist of calculators for the standardized tests (https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines/calculator-policies https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines...), and students will want to use one of them all the time to be familiar with it for the tests. And if you do manage to get the College Board to deem your calculator worthy, you'll have to basically make your product as bad as TI's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344087). And it's even worse for foreign countries' equivalents to the College Board, e.g., in Portugal, where it's literally a requirement that they can't be open source: https://www.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/vgiwk2/calculator_requirements_for_portuguese_national/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/vgiwk2/calcul...
  - satiric 4y ago
    To be fair I understand where the college board is coming from. Any effort to be able to add custom software is also a way to add software not approved by the college board, which is obviously an easy way to cheat on tests. And a light that goes on if you enter "exam mode" isn't enough, because if the calculator has the ability to replace the firmware (as the mathworks calculator had) you can disable the exam mode light. The only possible thing I can think of is a light that comes on when the user tries to access the part of flash memory that custom programs are stored in. If you implemented this in hardware then it would not be possible to disable that exam light, even with a firmware update. That being said, there was no reason to continue to use those same shitty screens for decades; I'm glad they've moved away from those now. They do still use a Z80 CPU but it's a modernized version that runs at a much higher clock speed, so that's also not too much of a downside.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      But proctors don't take apart everyone's calculators, and it's easy to do a hardware mod to make the exam light lie that isn't detectable without taking it apart.
kjellsbells 4y ago
This article is 8 years old, but the story is the same: TI took the time to create a moat around schools, originally by helping teachers integrate the calculator into their lessons, and then getting TI84 methods written into textbooks, and then eventually by aggressively going after alternatives like TI84 emulators on smartphones. Wabbitemu for example is excellent but a bit like asking Grandma to install openbsd because they have to be so careful about pissing off TI.

6 points by indigodaddy 4y ago

TI-89 was / is amazing for doing calculus for you :) Incredible how much staying power the TI-8x series has, more than 25 years of market dominance. Is this because they're really that good or due to schools controlling the situation by banning (or otherwise not supporting) other highly capable calculators?

josephcsible 4y ago
> Is this because they're really that good or due to schools controlling the situation by banning (or otherwise not supporting) other highly capable calculators? It's the latter, but note that it's because of the College Board, not any individual schools. It's basically impossible to launch a competing calculator since there's a whitelist of calculators for the standardized tests (https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines/calculator-policies https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines...), and students will want to use one of them all the time to be familiar with it for the tests. And if you do manage to get the College Board to deem your calculator worthy, you'll have to basically make your product as bad as TI's (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344087). And it's even worse for foreign countries' equivalents to the College Board, e.g., in Portugal, where it's literally a requirement that they can't be open source: https://www.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/vgiwk2/calculator_requirements_for_portuguese_national/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/vgiwk2/calcul...
- satiric 4y ago
  To be fair I understand where the college board is coming from. Any effort to be able to add custom software is also a way to add software not approved by the college board, which is obviously an easy way to cheat on tests. And a light that goes on if you enter "exam mode" isn't enough, because if the calculator has the ability to replace the firmware (as the mathworks calculator had) you can disable the exam mode light. The only possible thing I can think of is a light that comes on when the user tries to access the part of flash memory that custom programs are stored in. If you implemented this in hardware then it would not be possible to disable that exam light, even with a firmware update. That being said, there was no reason to continue to use those same shitty screens for decades; I'm glad they've moved away from those now. They do still use a Z80 CPU but it's a modernized version that runs at a much higher clock speed, so that's also not too much of a downside.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    But proctors don't take apart everyone's calculators, and it's easy to do a hardware mod to make the exam light lie that isn't detectable without taking it apart.

kjellsbells 4y ago

This article is 8 years old, but the story is the same: TI took the time to create a moat around schools, originally by helping teachers integrate the calculator into their lessons, and then getting TI84 methods written into textbooks, and then eventually by aggressively going after alternatives like TI84 emulators on smartphones. Wabbitemu for example is excellent but a bit like asking Grandma to install openbsd because they have to be so careful about pissing off TI.