3 ms·
When I was in college in the 80s there was an explosion of creativity in the calculator market (kind of like the TV and camera markets today -- they're all goin
by podperson 13y ago
When I was in college in the 80s there was an explosion of creativity in the calculator market (kind of like the TV and camera markets today -- they're all going broke and trying to come up with new killer products). One of the things that became very popular was calculators with 32kB or 64kB of RAM, a QWERTY keyboard, that ran BASIC.
Anyway, I was pure math major and we could bring pretty much anything short of an actual desktop computer into exams -- it was pretty much useless. (Now, a few years later, and Mathematica running on a maxed out Mac would have been pretty darn useful.)
- dblarons 13y agoWe were actually allowed to use Mathematica on our Linear Algebra exams this semester. I think it made the tests a lot more effective because you didn't have to go through the algebraic trouble of finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors, so the professor could focus more of the testing time on applications of those values. Having a computer in class opens the door for cheating, but in smaller classes it would be easy to tell if a student were browsing the Internet rather than finding a determinant.