Going digital would have some other advantages too. It would be easy to make a staged calculator where buttons only appear as you learn how to use them, for instance, so you don't stick a calculator in an Algebra II student's face that has stuff for calculus on it, which only contributes to the mystique of "math being hard".
For a specialist who uses physical calculators all the time for serious computations, the advantages of a dedicated physical keyboard for your math probably can't be beat.
But... uhh.... who exactly does that describe nowadays? I'm sure it's non-zero; I'm also sure we're into "niche within a niche" territory here.
I just use a computer, since generally I'm already using it when I have a question, it has many more resources, and it's easier to program complex calculations in.
Computers aren't always available. Computers aren't as portable (though phones are as portable as these calculators). The tactile feedback of a calculator beats phones (for me) in the same way that a physical keyboard's feedback better enables touch typing compared to an on-screen keyboard. Computers don't lend themselves to being quickly pulled out in meetings for quick computations.
Phones are a better alternative in many ways, but calculators do still have their benefits.
What I want is a physical HP 48G-alike, with a more capable processor and display, and a better connector (serial/IR on the 48G I had, should be bluetooth and wifi and USB today) paired with an SD card for storage.
If I were a hardware guy I'd seriously consider it. In a couple months I should have the time to prototype it, but that's about as far as I can get. My time is stretched very thin these days.
I do think people are not quite understanding that when I say "niche within a niche", I do that with the understanding that it does in fact exist. Had I meant to say "nobody", I would have said that. But it is a niche within a niche. STEM is certainly way to expansive; I'm STEM and I haven't had a use for a calculator since high schools were mandating them. It's certainly a niche within STEM, which is a niche. And the accountant's desks I've seen lately do not have calculators on them, and if they do, it's 4-function calcs.
Also, this is HN, so of course the people occupying that niche within a niche will pop up and say "But I use a physical calculator all the time!" That doesn't make me wrong, it just means that you're here. I'd also guess, with all due respect, because I know how this sort of thing goes, that at least some of the people who might claim they have a calculator they use all the time actually use it, say, every few months. Only a few people will seriously be using them all the time.
I'd still be using my HP 48G on a fairly regular basis if it hadn't suffered catastrophic damage (moron with a cup of coffee, paired with a drop onto a concrete floor). I used to have a lot of calculations programmed into it. I realize, of course, that I can do that on my computer, and I do. But it was handy when I was running around between different systems (main desktop, lab stations, etc.). I could just grab one device and have it with me all the time. Especially since I shifted OSes as well (Windows, various flavors; Linux, various flavors) and not all had network access (or accessed the same network). Keeping those programs synced up would've been tedious. And then there were meetings where dragging out my laptop for something that was quick (but hard to do by hand) was way overkill. My phone could work, but often I've been unable to have it in the labs (various reasons over the years).
I'll add, a lot of those calculators were pretty damned hardy. It really did take an unfortunate sequence of events to kill my HP. Any one of which it probably could have survived, but the combination was just too much for it. In a lab or field environment, I like them better than a phone or computer for many operations (though definitely downsides since they haven't really kept up with generally computing power).
What I'm interested in is something that takes hand drawn input and converts it to expressions that can be evaluated. A dedicated keyboard for math has been immensely helpful to me, as well, because it speeds up the input more than any software only solution I've tried. But there are always things which require some thought about how to enter them in. Not having to do that conversion myself would be pretty nice. I think there's some potential there.
It might just be me, but I read up on the buttons that I didn't understand yet. Some of them were really useful shortcuts that I wasn't supposed to know about.
I would fully support making it relatively easy to unlock those buttens, but, remember, we're educating not just "people who will eventually hang out on Hacker News". It is not reasonable to take the personal experiences of people here as a baseline for all education.
> Hardware is primitive and some enterprising company can devise a much nicer interface and probably at 1/4th price.
But nobody bothers, because they all know that HP can offer it at 1/4 the price, too—and less. Nobody touches HP's margins, because HP can survive on much smaller margins than any startup ever could. Why start a price war you could only lose?
On the newer Casio scientific calculators, there's a button you can press to switch between fractional and decimal output. IIRC the button looks like S>D.
If the exam is done on a computer (what they mean by "going digital"), they can have a local copy of the web app (on the computer or their locked down network).
I understand this intellectually, but it still makes me sad.
I had to reach down into my bag, to check the number on mine:
TI-85. I actually use mine occasionally. When my original one died, I picked up a used on amazon. I think I know how my old science teacher who kept a slice rule in his shirt pocket felt........
Related story (the author describing the TI monopoly jogged my memory): I am part of the generation that was required to buy a big blue or black graphing calculator. As a high schooler I was indignant that we were being told to buy from just one company. So, based on reviews posted in a variety of online forums, I bought an HP-48 instead of the specified TI.
After telling all my friends that my new calculator was going to be amazing, I got it home, pulled it out of the box, turned it on, tried to add two numbers, and failed. After the sinking feeling passed, I started in to figuring out what I had determined the root-problem was: Reverse Polish Notation. A couple years of math and physics classes were then spent trying desperately to not let on to my peers or teachers that I had no idea how to do the thing that was being taught. I'd frequently spent time scouring the Internet and HP-48 menus to replicate what I'd seen in class.
But man did I love that calculator. The RPN stopped being a liability, and became an asset. And, the equation library saved my bacon on occasion.
Oh yeah! The keys were amazing. They rank right up there with popping bubble wrap in terms of satisfaction they bring. They had a crazy high activation force and zero ambiguity as to whether or not they had clicked.
Yes, I used and still have the HP48SX. It got me through college as a math major and then graduate school as well. And the fact that people can't understand RPN doesn't speak well to the caliber of the students in higher education.
It's an interesting mental litmus test. Opposition to RPN is rarely about inability or carefully considered dislike. It's mostly about rejection of difference.
Same deal with lisp syntax. Beginners take to Racket's parens easily, but (some) veteran programmers are dispositionally unwilling to even attempt to see the rationale beyond the learned aesthetics, even when there's so much to gain.
Similar situation here. It was... interesting going through high school and then college where they recommended a different calculator, and being one of the 1-3 people in class that didn't have the recommended[1] calculator. Certain operations took a bit longer, but also homework and tests were catered towards the known capabilities of the expected calculator, leading to a lot of manual and semi-manual solving of things other people zipped through with more calculator assistance.
On one hand, that gives you a pretty good understanding of what's actually going on. You're supposed to have that anyway, but it's easy to bumble through an assignment without a firm grasp of the mechanics if you have a lot of assistance. On the other hand, it led to the time and effort for some homework assignments being high enough that I chose not to complete them and focus on other homework.
Do you all hear that? What is it? It's the fond-memory train coming to this thread.
A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pong was networked with two Ti-85s so each player would be on their own calc, connected using the connection cable (sold separately). Anyway, got pretty far in the game, but had to borrow my friends calc to test it. Something you should know about the connection cable and bugginess, is it sometimes caused both connected calculators to crash and reset. And I mean FULL reset with no memory.
We lost both Quadra Pong and our RPG in one tiny scary second... still crying over that one.
On the TI-86 you could put machine code into programs (as hex strings). I lacked the cable to connect it to my PC so this was great fun. Simple calculation programs were so much faster. Until I mistyped something and bricked it, had to force a full reset (removed batteries and the watch battery). That's probably where I learned to appreciate what my parents had gone through with punch cards in the 70s, manually translating assembly to machine code.
+/- 10-15 years ago i was also programming games on an Ti-83?
There is a cable you can connect the calculator with the usb port of your pc.
very usefull to save your games, and get even more games.
There was also a program, you can program it on your computer, and than sync it to your calculator.
I started programming on a TI-82; I was making programs for basically every formula we had in math. My proudest accomplishment was a program for studying the unit circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle), all in TI-BASIC.
I later got a TI-89, you could program this one in C. I eventually made a darts game on in, complete with a two-player mode, and a single-player mode against an 'AI' with various difficulty levels.
This is basically what made me end up in this career.
I had a TI-85, and because it only had 2D plotting while the TI-89 had 3D plotting, I decided to write my own 3D plotting program. I allowed the user to input a 3D equation, and then it would draw a mesh using trig to project it from isometric 3D to 2D and render it on the screen.
It was very slow, but it worked! I even used it for one of my calculus classes. It made very pretty graphics. I later ported the algorithm to Visual Basic just for kicks, and it ran a lot faster on a PC. In the process I learned a ton about programming and trig.
So many memories of using the AXE parser for the TI. It's a gaming engine that compiles code to assembly, and it's probably at least 10-20 times faster than TI BASIC. Anyway, I've made a two calculator pong using that engine, and the network commands are quite simple with AXE! I managed to combine the server and client into one program that auto configured on startup. Making games with my friend was what really pushed me into computer science. Here's a link for the parser if you're interested.
Contrary to what the article offhandedly suggests ("there are some drawbacks to using an online calculator on tests -- it's trickier to spot cheating, for example"), I'd wager an online-only service can be locked down in ways that the TIs couldn't be, and with considerably less manual effort.
A common practice before standardized exams was resetting the RAM and the Archive, and deleting Apps; some school districts even use special Apps written for the calculator to enforce that it doesn't contain unauthorized code.
Meanwhile, server-side code running somewhere else produces a clean environment for every user.
I am not sure exactly what is being implied here. Schools are still insisting that students have to use a TI-84 but that an app of some kind that emulates a TI-84 is OK?
Not sure how that makes sense if true. Do schools actually teach classes on how to use a calculator? Is this just another way that schools are not dealing with the fact that computers exist?
Based on my experiences, it's less likely "calculator class" and more likely "integrals are done by pressing shift+ln(), then right arrow to enter the limits, then comma followed by the variable" (this is an example not following any real calculator) during calculus. So rather than teaching the topic fully and then letting students figure out how to aid themselves with calculators or computers, they teach how to do the technique on the dominant calculator. So if you're not inclined to read manuals or troubleshoot or think about what you're doing, having a Casio instead of a TI would be big trouble.
I mean, I understand why education wants these calculators, to control the students during tests. But after you leave school, why haven't calculator phone apps taken their place? Or is it because that once you leave school and you really need to do calculations, you turn to R, Matlab, or Python instead?
If you have an android phone you can download Graph 89 Free for a fully functioning ti-89 emulator. All you need is the ROM provided by Ti and you're golden!
But the "magic" with the TI-84 series was not the calculator itself. It was TI's excellent marketing where (nearly) every school district, plus the SAT group, were all convinced that this particular calculator was "ok" and all others were "not ok". With the end result of a guaranteed market for TI for this calculator, without having to compete with any other manufacturers. I.e., they (TI) managed to create a 'legal' monopoly by convincing the govt. agencies to only allow this one calculator in class and during tests.
If I need graphing, I'll go to my computer and use Mathematica or gnuplot.
Where a handheld calculator comes in handy is when doing something on paper that needs some arithmetic or trig/exp/log/roots. For that I find a physical calculator nicer than a phone calculator.
First, with the physical calculator it is easier to operate it without looking because of the physical buttons. Second, the physical calculator doesn't go to sleep as often and wakes up faster (and doesn't require authentication).
An example of a calculator that is almost perfect in my opinion is the HP-15C [1]. Note the dimensions: 128 × 79 × 15 mm (5" x 3.1" x 0.6"). This makes it small enough to work with even if you are working off on a sheet of letter-sized or A4 paper on a clipboard, or out of a spiral-bound notebook, and it easily fits in a shirt pocket.
In 2012 HP brought this back into production in a limited edition that sold for about $140. I grabbed one so that I would have two, since my original from 1982 can't last forever.
It should be possible to make a "calculator case" or "calculator overlay" for a phone that would put physical buttons for a calculator over the touch screen. There are materials that "conduct" touch. It should be possible to incorporate that into the button design so that when not pressed the touch conductive material not touching the screen, and when pressed fully it touches both the screen and the finger that is pressing the button.
Maybe even get fancy, and incorporate a small eInk display on each button to display the labels for the keys, and include an app that can change the labels to match the needs of whatever app you are using the buttons with.
I think one of the reasons why many teachers prefer the old ti83 it is because it isn't online. They don't want people cheating. Some classes you could only have a basic scientific calculator. In a lot of my college classes they just didn't let you use a graphing calculator since you could put a notes in there. Some classes just banned calculators.
I just have a hard time believe schools and teachers will allow interned connected devices on tests.
Looks like a marketing campaign to me. It would make much more sense to replace the calculator with an app that works offline. As a student, I wouldn't trust I have Internet. As a school, I wouldn't trust students aren't cheating.
The real travesty here is that calculators cost $100 USD. They have a Z80, some buttons wired up, and a very low res LCD screen. Students should be BUILDING these in their engineering classes. They must cost only a few dollars to make, it's disgusting that they cost so much because of forced lock in and requirements.
Maybe one of the first applications of RISC-V should be a fully open source graphing calculator. Then anyone could build one to the same spec and they would be cheap + help open source hardware.
I find it interesting that all students had to pay $80 out of pocket for our TI-81 but the same school district a generation later hands out $800 ipads to entire classes like they're candy.
I used the same TI-81 from 7th thru 12th grade which was 6 years, but the refresh for ipads at the same district is a mere 4 years.
I can't help but notice the TI-81 was essentially kid proof and indestructible but the ipad is (intentionally) very delicate to drive sales.
Finally I think I used my TI-81 in math and science classes more hours per year than my son uses his ipad. Mostly we used the 81 to do math, mostly my son's school issued ipad is for "downtime" gaming (minecraft) and youtube watching with some casual internet surfing.
The tone of the article implies the $100 graphing calculator was a bad era, but its worth considering things have gotten much worse, not improved at all.
I think the only thing I learned in four years of high school math was how to screw around and graph functions on a TI-83. Aside from how to use the calculator, we didn't cover anything that wasn't in the Saxon Algebra 1 book between 8th grade and 12th grade AP Calculus. What a waste of so many hours...
I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can.
It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons.
Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly.
As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there.
On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load.
TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.
Schools are still stuck in the past in regard to "cheating".
I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year.
In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students of the future to take a test without that digital link to everyone and everything is like teaching someone to juggle, and then making them tie one hand to the opposite foot for the test.
It's ridiculous--almost like asking algorithmic questions for the whiteboard interview. No, I didn't memorize forever the big-O for eight different sorting algorithms, because I have been using Internet search engines since AltaVista, and card catalogs and textbook indexes before that. The era when someone had to become his own information library, with comprehensive index, to be good at his job has been over for a long, long time.
So I think the burden is on teachers and testers to devise new methods of testing that make instant information lookup and collaboration entirely irrelevant to the methods of student evaluation. Make "cheating" an optional feature rather than a bug. I think in the short term that means that tests will have to be time-limited and questions will have to be procedurally generated, and unique to each test-taker. And further, the questions will have to be structured such that they can't be solved by just copy-pasting them into a search box.
I recall how I programmed my TI-85 to show "Mem cleared Defaults set" before my exams. It wasn't because I wanted to cheat, but because I didn't want to lose the other programs I wrote just because some teacher didn't trust me. Obviously, someone else could have easily done the same to protect a crib sheet or answer key. When your school system mandates that every student have the same calculators, that type of cheat only becomes more common. The teachers that wrote their exams as "open textbook" never needed to worry about crib sheets. They wouldn't care if you memorized the image of the required pages, or just the page numbers, or just the index key, so long as you could get the correct answers before the end of class.
The tests I took in school are obsolete. No school should be trying to extend their lifespan by creating administrative calculator monopolies and arbitrarily blocking newer technologies. Welcome yourself to the 21st century and write better tests.
I partly agree with you, a lot of tests (probably the majority) are bad tests. Many test on memorization rather than comprehension. But tests with a focus on comprehension are valuable evaluation tools, and access to the internet would break that without going to particularly contrived problem sets.
The purpose of an education is to understand the topics (language, math, science, art), not the tools (as in specific mechanical or informational aids). Making them (too) available during evaluations like exams and tests would only show that students were able to put something into Mathematica and get a result, not that they understood what they were doing.
I'm heartily glad that I went to school before calculators were available. As far as I can see they are just a distraction. How is a calculator useful for learning calculus?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadFor a specialist who uses physical calculators all the time for serious computations, the advantages of a dedicated physical keyboard for your math probably can't be beat.
But... uhh.... who exactly does that describe nowadays? I'm sure it's non-zero; I'm also sure we're into "niche within a niche" territory here.
Which reminds me I must see if I can get a replacement battery for my old HP RPN Calculator
Phones are a better alternative in many ways, but calculators do still have their benefits.
What I want is a physical HP 48G-alike, with a more capable processor and display, and a better connector (serial/IR on the 48G I had, should be bluetooth and wifi and USB today) paired with an SD card for storage.
Also, this is HN, so of course the people occupying that niche within a niche will pop up and say "But I use a physical calculator all the time!" That doesn't make me wrong, it just means that you're here. I'd also guess, with all due respect, because I know how this sort of thing goes, that at least some of the people who might claim they have a calculator they use all the time actually use it, say, every few months. Only a few people will seriously be using them all the time.
If your working in it having a hex octal / binary conversions can be usfull
I'll add, a lot of those calculators were pretty damned hardy. It really did take an unfortunate sequence of events to kill my HP. Any one of which it probably could have survived, but the combination was just too much for it. In a lab or field environment, I like them better than a phone or computer for many operations (though definitely downsides since they haven't really kept up with generally computing power).
Prompts for exploratory learning could be presented in places other than the calculator keyboard.
The school boards should simply certify multiple devices for use in the exams.
Hardware is primitive and some enterprising company can devise a much nicer interface and probably at 1/4th price.
For one, the web app is free. They also have free iOS and Android apps that presumably work offline.
But nobody bothers, because they all know that HP can offer it at 1/4 the price, too—and less. Nobody touches HP's margins, because HP can survive on much smaller margins than any startup ever could. Why start a price war you could only lose?
Luckily there is this rather nice Android App called RealCalc which emulates the kind of caclulator I used to use at school quite well!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.nickfine...
I spent 100s of hours using that calculator so having a exact replica on my phone is very helpful.
My kids use yet another different Casio calculator which continually frustrates me with its desire to represent everything as a fraction!
After telling all my friends that my new calculator was going to be amazing, I got it home, pulled it out of the box, turned it on, tried to add two numbers, and failed. After the sinking feeling passed, I started in to figuring out what I had determined the root-problem was: Reverse Polish Notation. A couple years of math and physics classes were then spent trying desperately to not let on to my peers or teachers that I had no idea how to do the thing that was being taught. I'd frequently spent time scouring the Internet and HP-48 menus to replicate what I'd seen in class.
But man did I love that calculator. The RPN stopped being a liability, and became an asset. And, the equation library saved my bacon on occasion.
Same deal with lisp syntax. Beginners take to Racket's parens easily, but (some) veteran programmers are dispositionally unwilling to even attempt to see the rationale beyond the learned aesthetics, even when there's so much to gain.
So it wasn't a monopoly, more like a duopoly.
On one hand, that gives you a pretty good understanding of what's actually going on. You're supposed to have that anyway, but it's easy to bumble through an assignment without a firm grasp of the mechanics if you have a lot of assistance. On the other hand, it led to the time and effort for some homework assignments being high enough that I chose not to complete them and focus on other homework.
1: A Casio in high school, TI in college.
It's so very useful for adding up columns of numbers when doing accounting and bookkeeping!
A friend and I were programming a text-and-map based RPG on the Ti-85. It was really awesome, you could walk around on the map from town to town and enemies would find you kinda like Final Fantasy, then you fight them. Anyway we were pretty far into the game. I started programming a "Quadra Pong" game at the same time. This Quadra Pong was networked with two Ti-85s so each player would be on their own calc, connected using the connection cable (sold separately). Anyway, got pretty far in the game, but had to borrow my friends calc to test it. Something you should know about the connection cable and bugginess, is it sometimes caused both connected calculators to crash and reset. And I mean FULL reset with no memory.
We lost both Quadra Pong and our RPG in one tiny scary second... still crying over that one.
(truly sorry for your loss!)
I later got a TI-89, you could program this one in C. I eventually made a darts game on in, complete with a two-player mode, and a single-player mode against an 'AI' with various difficulty levels.
This is basically what made me end up in this career.
It was very slow, but it worked! I even used it for one of my calculus classes. It made very pretty graphics. I later ported the algorithm to Visual Basic just for kicks, and it ran a lot faster on a PC. In the process I learned a ton about programming and trig.
http://clrhome.org/tutorials/axe/
http://axe.eeems.ca/Commands.html
A common practice before standardized exams was resetting the RAM and the Archive, and deleting Apps; some school districts even use special Apps written for the calculator to enforce that it doesn't contain unauthorized code.
Meanwhile, server-side code running somewhere else produces a clean environment for every user.
But they have to either provide fully-locked-down computers or somehow lock student computers down otherwise. That sounds hard or expensive, too.
If schools adopt chromebooks like mad, could work?
Not sure how that makes sense if true. Do schools actually teach classes on how to use a calculator? Is this just another way that schools are not dealing with the fact that computers exist?
I mean, I understand why education wants these calculators, to control the students during tests. But after you leave school, why haven't calculator phone apps taken their place? Or is it because that once you leave school and you really need to do calculations, you turn to R, Matlab, or Python instead?
Also, I'm surprised nobody has quoted xkcd yet:
https://xkcd.com/768/
Edit: I know phone apps exist. I am just wondering why they don't seem to be more popular. Or are they gaining popularity I'm not seeing?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desmos-graphing-calculator/i...
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.desmos.cal...
The article probably should have mentioned that. :)
Some are: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hp.hp15c15...
But the "magic" with the TI-84 series was not the calculator itself. It was TI's excellent marketing where (nearly) every school district, plus the SAT group, were all convinced that this particular calculator was "ok" and all others were "not ok". With the end result of a guaranteed market for TI for this calculator, without having to compete with any other manufacturers. I.e., they (TI) managed to create a 'legal' monopoly by convincing the govt. agencies to only allow this one calculator in class and during tests.
Where a handheld calculator comes in handy is when doing something on paper that needs some arithmetic or trig/exp/log/roots. For that I find a physical calculator nicer than a phone calculator.
First, with the physical calculator it is easier to operate it without looking because of the physical buttons. Second, the physical calculator doesn't go to sleep as often and wakes up faster (and doesn't require authentication).
An example of a calculator that is almost perfect in my opinion is the HP-15C [1]. Note the dimensions: 128 × 79 × 15 mm (5" x 3.1" x 0.6"). This makes it small enough to work with even if you are working off on a sheet of letter-sized or A4 paper on a clipboard, or out of a spiral-bound notebook, and it easily fits in a shirt pocket.
In 2012 HP brought this back into production in a limited edition that sold for about $140. I grabbed one so that I would have two, since my original from 1982 can't last forever.
It should be possible to make a "calculator case" or "calculator overlay" for a phone that would put physical buttons for a calculator over the touch screen. There are materials that "conduct" touch. It should be possible to incorporate that into the button design so that when not pressed the touch conductive material not touching the screen, and when pressed fully it touches both the screen and the finger that is pressing the button.
Maybe even get fancy, and incorporate a small eInk display on each button to display the labels for the keys, and include an app that can change the labels to match the needs of whatever app you are using the buttons with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-15C
I just have a hard time believe schools and teachers will allow interned connected devices on tests.
Maybe one of the first applications of RISC-V should be a fully open source graphing calculator. Then anyone could build one to the same spec and they would be cheap + help open source hardware.
I used the same TI-81 from 7th thru 12th grade which was 6 years, but the refresh for ipads at the same district is a mere 4 years.
I can't help but notice the TI-81 was essentially kid proof and indestructible but the ipad is (intentionally) very delicate to drive sales.
Finally I think I used my TI-81 in math and science classes more hours per year than my son uses his ipad. Mostly we used the 81 to do math, mostly my son's school issued ipad is for "downtime" gaming (minecraft) and youtube watching with some casual internet surfing.
The tone of the article implies the $100 graphing calculator was a bad era, but its worth considering things have gotten much worse, not improved at all.
I love Desmos. It's a great tool for the classroom. I use it whenever I can.
It's also not a replacement for a handheld calculator. If the internet goes out, you lose your calculator. If it is working, then you're policing students to make sure that they're using their device for calculation. If it is working and you have the best students in the world or a locked-down network, it's still slower, less precise, and more annoying to use a calculator with virtual buttons than a handheld calculator with physical buttons.
Because of the nature of classroom instruction, there was almost always going to be at least local monopolies on calculators. If you're reading HN, you probably didn't struggle to figure out a graphing calculator. Many students do. Part of a lesson is often teaching students how to use a calculator, and it is far easier to only give a single set of instructions. Regardless of how well you have the other students working independently and how well the teacher knows all three+ calculator brands, the most valuable resource in a class is teacher time and attention. If a teacher spends 15 minutes explaining how to use a calculator instead of 5, that's 10 minutes of class time that students don't have access to the teacher to learn math. That adds up quickly.
As a result, most schools decide, independently of any marketing, to standardize on a single calculator. As the article notes, TI got to where it is because it spent a lot of money supporting teachers for free. Momentum took it from there.
On top of all that, the other thing a lot of people overlook re: the TI-84 family (and other handheld calculators) is how fast it is. Not the processor, but the speed at which it gets you an answer. It powers on and is instantly ready to go. You don't get that with any computer solution. Shared devices have to be logged into. Browsers have to open. Web apps have to load.
TI also has a new classroom calculator with an ARM processor and a bunch of other features, the NSpire. It's sold at about the same price points as an 84. Most teachers I talked to found it infuriating: you hit the power button, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to boot. Then when it does, it loads a menu screen where you can choose if you want to do calculations or something else. The old hardware just worked: you hit on, and before you can touch another key, it's ready to go.
I recall reading a rant on the Internet--I forgot where--about how the real cheat is when a teacher gives the same exam to every student, year after year.
In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet constantly, including students. We are close to that now. I can look up any obscure bit of information in only a few moments. Expecting students of the future to take a test without that digital link to everyone and everything is like teaching someone to juggle, and then making them tie one hand to the opposite foot for the test.
It's ridiculous--almost like asking algorithmic questions for the whiteboard interview. No, I didn't memorize forever the big-O for eight different sorting algorithms, because I have been using Internet search engines since AltaVista, and card catalogs and textbook indexes before that. The era when someone had to become his own information library, with comprehensive index, to be good at his job has been over for a long, long time.
So I think the burden is on teachers and testers to devise new methods of testing that make instant information lookup and collaboration entirely irrelevant to the methods of student evaluation. Make "cheating" an optional feature rather than a bug. I think in the short term that means that tests will have to be time-limited and questions will have to be procedurally generated, and unique to each test-taker. And further, the questions will have to be structured such that they can't be solved by just copy-pasting them into a search box.
I recall how I programmed my TI-85 to show "Mem cleared Defaults set" before my exams. It wasn't because I wanted to cheat, but because I didn't want to lose the other programs I wrote just because some teacher didn't trust me. Obviously, someone else could have easily done the same to protect a crib sheet or answer key. When your school system mandates that every student have the same calculators, that type of cheat only becomes more common. The teachers that wrote their exams as "open textbook" never needed to worry about crib sheets. They wouldn't care if you memorized the image of the required pages, or just the page numbers, or just the index key, so long as you could get the correct answers before the end of class.
The tests I took in school are obsolete. No school should be trying to extend their lifespan by creating administrative calculator monopolies and arbitrarily blocking newer technologies. Welcome yourself to the 21st century and write better tests.
The purpose of an education is to understand the topics (language, math, science, art), not the tools (as in specific mechanical or informational aids). Making them (too) available during evaluations like exams and tests would only show that students were able to put something into Mathematica and get a result, not that they understood what they were doing.