I still have mine from high school statistics class. The best part was being able to side-load apps and play that spaceship game (phoenix something?) in class while looking like you were mad calculating some P Value.
So much nostalgia around that game. If you didn't get the ultimate weapon by the time the fast moving circles came around you're basically screwed, and would need to restart. (since money drop was RNG).
I think that was actually the game that got me into programming, to figure out "how did they even do that." (and taught myself in isolation such terrible things as not understanding what a for loop was actually used for, and using it as a time delay loop.)
I caused half of my friends in algebra to flunk thanks to pheonix. I had no idea they were going to play it that much when I transferred it to them. My teacher once said that if she found out who gave everyone pheonix on their calculators she was going to flunk them. Luckily no one turned me in.
I have the HP-50g. Love that thing, though I don't get to use it much these days. I bought it for taking the tests in my intro physics course at uni, after my TI-89 got stolen by some doucherocket. My physics professor was a huge fan of the HP RPN calculators, and recommended them highly.
I was also notorious for bringing a slide rule into tests in case the batteries ran out on the calculator.
Oh the one hand, TI calcs were a wonderful tool and toy for the yound math needs -- i lusted for the 81 and 85. Maybe the 84+ is perfect for its job. On the other hand, it must have less than $15 wholesale unit cost now, and has no right to enforce a proprietary OS/software lockdown.
well, since you can sideload apps onto the tiny rom... and there are romdumps available online as well as the official ROM from TI's website... presumably one could make their own ROM or tweak it... but... I don't see much of a market for that as it's main purpose is to calculate...
You'd be better with an Open Pandora running R to do any kind of Science work at school in a portable format. These calculators are completely ancient.
Things like Battery Life, use during exams and the keyboard/button layout might be an issue, though. That and the fact that most high-school classes probably use TI calculators rather than R.
I have a Pandora and I only need to charge it one a week or something, the battery lasts very long (even though I used it a couple of hours a day). So in the school context it would do just fine.
If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)?
The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT.
I don't think the problem is the SAT/ACT. That's a problem with cellphones, but lots of calculators are allowed on those tests, including the Casios[1]. The bigger challenge seems to be that teachers default to assigning TIs to their students.
This is it. In high school statistics, I tried to use my dad's HP-48g, which I dearly loved (in large part thanks to RPL---this was fairly soon after I discovered Scheme and dc). This didn't really work: the teacher would explain how to do something (automated statistical tests, for example) on a TI-89, and I'd have to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out the equivalent.
This was a pain, and it was compounded by the fact that the HP-48 didn't have the same features as the TI-89, so I was frequently out of luck. The teacher wrote his homeworks and tests with an eye towards what was doable without too much effort on a TI-89, and I imagine that the TI people chose the featureset for the 89 with an eye towards what people would want to do in high school classes, so using anything else was an uphill battle.
(We also had occasional homeworks in Excel, and I ran into the same trouble trying to do them in Perl. It didn't help that I was very far from an expert in either Perl or the HP-48g.)
As a counterpoint, my HS classes used TI-81s, and I had bought a TI-85. Not all the things were in the same place, and so I often had to think of other ways of getting to the same place. At the time I thought it was a good thing, but I'm not sure if it was just that I was geeking out on the nicer hardware. ;)
Back in 1998, when I had to buy one, I was given a choice. I could get any of the TI, Casio, or HP options. Most of my classmates got the TI-83, but I chose the TI-89. Mine was much faster and had more memory. I could create better applications. Unfortunately, the teacher taught to the TI-83. Instructions for homework showed what menu options were needed to find the formulas required.
It was obvious that if you didn't have the calculator that everyone else has, you might as well not even bring the book to class. You spent more time trying to find the equivalent settings and processes to do the work than actually getting anything done.
A competitor would have to include the exact same formulas in the exact same menu locations.
Isn't that the problem with calculators? The lesson becomes "How to work the calculator" instead of math.
I got an HP programmable calculator. It operated on RPN. That makes you think about problems differently, IMHO in a better way.
I remember a 'calculator Olympics' involving solving an incredible half-page calculation involving scores of parentheses and transcendental functions. Everybody else launched into typing all that into their TI calculator. I started from the innermost expression (as ALL RPN-trained people do). It was an identity. Hm. As I worked my way out, everything was an identity (sin(90) etc). I got the answer without ever touching a button on my calculator.
All the years of using it with physics homework and statistics homework and whatnot has wired its usage into my brain.
Sure, I could use R or Python, but when all I need to do is some simple math the calculator is always faster. It has tactile buttons I can operate with one hand, a clear readable screen, and a battery that lasts long. And it's simple.
In high school I programmed a mini-RPG on a TI-85. It actually was quite a lot of fun (the programming, not so much the game). In our last year I think we could also buy either a TI-89 or TI-92 (which was quite the behemoth). In our school the math teachers were free to choose between TI and HP calculators, so we had some other classes / groups that had to calculate with reverse polish notation. At that time I laughed at this idea, thinking why would anyone choose this over infix notation. Then years later, after learning LISP and prefix notation, I laughed at my dumb younger self.
>"While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera ... "
How about a bigger screen, more memory and a faster chip? I get that there still exists a calculator niche, but come on, it doesn't mean you just don't even try!
I've got a TI 92+ which was, in my mind, the pinnacle of the calculator era. As I recall the 83 was Z80 based and the 92 was 68000 based, but what really made the 92 something I needed to keep was that it did pretty much everything Mathematica could do on a Sun-2 Workstation back in the day.
As far as disrupting goes, I use TyDig on my iPad as my most often used "calculator" these days. The 92 doesn't come out much. But for the market (high school) it is hard to beat the combination of features and cost that a calculator brings to the table.
"We have to keep evolving on this platform, but it can’t be innovation for the sake of innovation,” said Peter Balyta, president of Texas Instruments’ calculator division. “While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera, a whole bunch of things, we could do, but teachers don’t want us to. And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.”
What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.
> They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price.
It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.
> and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.
This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems.
The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.
Chances are, if you were able to program the algorithms required to solve the problems, you understood them well enough or more than enough to pass the course.
Definitely not the case for me. I had as many books and websites as I needed while creating those programs, but did not have them available during tests.
I would occasionally bury stuff in programs that shouldn't have been there. I was afraid that the teacher might look at my programs and if there was a functional program, would realize what I was doing, so I'd usually have a code language that I could easily decipher but wouldn't be easily figured out by someone else.
I probably gave my teachers too much credit, but the classes that could use calculators were usually taught by teachers who knew about programming the things.
During college, we used Ti-89 calculators, like the ti-83, but with more ram/rom, higher resolution display etc. It has simple apps such as a notepad and spreadsheet.
Our professor didn't worry about cheating, he just designed the tests while keeping in mind probably every student had written notes on their calculator. In fact, he allowed us to have all our notes and books with us while performing the test, just like you would do in the real world when tackling a difficult problem.
That would be an epic fail. Like most of us, I carried around a 4-pack of AAA for my calc (at least thats what the TI-81 took) and if the battery finally ran out during a test, no problem, 30 seconds later you're back on the air. Also the teachers sold batteries or you could bum them off a neighbor. With rechargeable, I guess you just fail?
Also rechargables are carefully value engineered to fail after a couple years, so that would increase costs quite a bit. A school system that bought a couple TI84 a decade ago can keep on using them today with COTS walmart batteries, but sealed rechargables means they would have to keep buying them every couple years. With careful value engineering the mfgr could likely get the lifetime down to a bit over a year, and sell kids a new calc every single august for school.
Note that these calcs, at least the TI-81, were not like smartphones. A set of batteries lasted at least a couple months even with some game playing. I wrote some text adventures and others wrote little arcade games and still we got over a month at a time. The -81 was extremely crude as a programming language even compared to 1980s home computer BASICs.
I have fond memories of the TI-89 - all the power of a TI-92, but the same form factor as the TI-83/84, so it wouldn't raise much attention.
Having a computer algebra system in my handheld calculator got me all the way from pre-algebra to intro diff eq in high school. It's hard to say whether it was unfair, but being able to try algebra and calculus things out on the CAS really helped me explore and understand concepts.
"Apple sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory"
I tend to let it slide when people get memory and storage confused, but I hold journalists to a higher standard. This isn't even a semantic error; this came right after describing the RAM capacity of a TI-84 Plus C Silver. Nothing Matt McFarland wrote in this article was wrong, but it certainly wasn't highly-informed either...
Comparing TI calculators to consumer electronics is a rather moot point. It's better to compare against the plummeting costs of microcomputers in general. The Raspberry Pi is better proof that TI is marking their products up 1000%+! Nobody needs a calculator with a 1GHz processor and 512GB of RAM, and 8-128GB of flash storage, so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?
> so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?
Because TI has tried in the past to introduce more powerful calculators, and that fell flat.
The 84 exists because schools expect it. That is all. Until they accept your smartphone as a calculator, TI can markup the 84 as much as they want and everyone has to buy it because there is no free market in school calculators.
There are worse monopolies, I guess. The 83+/84+ has good software and is neigh indestructible. The physical interface is very good and beats a touch screen.
A TI calculator fast enough to run NumPy to build simulations and interactive gizmos would be super cool though. Allowing students to build colorful mathematical animations and physics simulations using simple building blocks would be awesome. Of course that can all be done with laptops but having things in the palm of your hand shouldn't be underestimated.
The TI-83 is more in the textbook market than the electronics or calculator market. Once you realize this, the price doesn't seem so surprising. At least, it doesn't seem any more surprising than textbook prices.
So in US teachers get to decide the calculator to use? That's crazy.
When I was in junior high (in France) it was about 50/50 between TI and Casio. In high school a few kids had an HP48. The rare time there was something specific to do with the calculator (eg. calculating sequences) the teacher would ask one geek from each camp to explain to the class how to do it with calculators of that brand.
Mostly up to highschool and standardized exams. In college usually there was no constraints though many professors stated that we have to clear the memory before the exam. I used to have an HP48 for most of my college years.
Yes, its seen as vocational training. Rather than teaching trig or how to apply it or what it means, you get how to display sine waves on a specific TI model.
I'm old enough that my vocational training in high school math classes was on the venerable yet new at that time TI-81. That vocational training was not terribly useful in university classes, the rot had not reached that high (at that time)
One thing that was the "killer app" for graphing calculators, at least through college in the last decade (even with wifi), was the fact that there were apps.
Graphing calculators were the first mass market mobile computers under $200 with what you could almost refer to as an app store, via ticalc.org (oh how many hours I spent on there). The interfaces had to be easy to use with low resolution screens and usually four directional buttons. Apps had to be about content. Games were pretty fun.
My TI-89 has survived 11 years. It's survived bike falls, being thrown across the room several times (when I was too quick to grab it and it went flying out of the cover). I use it infrequently but the batteries haven't been changed in over a year. I still have more screen real estate when I am typing on it than I do with my iPhone 5 (both in vertical and landscape). It has actual buttons and I have muscle memory so I don't even have to look at it when I type in numbers and symbols.
I have a periodic table app on my TI-89 that has been on there since 2003. The information someone in chemistry or physics needs is quicker to access than http://www.ptable.com or wikipedia. I'm sure there are apps on an iPod that are probably better now, but an iPod's batteries don't last months.
What could usurp it? Something in the same form factor that can last 48+ hours and take AA or AAA batteries. Something that provides temporary instructor override, allowing an instructor to enforce a policy temporarily (i.e. disable the CAS). Something that might integrate well with tools from TI that are out there. Something that's useful from middle school up to engineering/chemistry/physics.
Maybe something e-ink (and/or e-ink buttons), plastic, ARM or Atmel, Linux, python and some sort of CAS (Mathematica/Maple branded) by default, with an App store/ecosystem. Something $50-$75. WiFi only, but off by default. Something that probably looks a bit like a nokia n800 or blackberry. I think that would be reasonable.
I've owned 4 (!) different TI graphing calculators throughout the years. I believe it started with the TI-85 in the mid-90s, followed by the 86, then the 92, and finally culminating with the TI-89 in 1999. I don't think they've really surpassed the 89 in terms of functionality. I ended up selling the 92, as it was replaced with the functionally-equivalent 89 (in the familiar TI form-factor), and gave the 85 to my sister, so today all that remains is the 89 and the 86. I have fond memories of playing games and writing small programs on TI graphing calcs (ticalc.org still exists, apparently). At first only BASIC programs were supported, but then some folks figured out how to hack the 85 to run assembly, which continued on the other models. TI fought it at first, but later reluctantly supported assembly programs. Some enterprising hackers managed to implement rudimentary audio support via the data port, which I thought was quite impressive. The 84 Plus is essentially the old TI-82 platform iterated a number of times (TI-82, TI-83, 83 Plus, 83 Plus Silver, etc.)
I've been waiting for years for TI to make a graphing calc smartphone app, but with margins such as those described in the article, why would they? It'll likely take a major shift in the testing standards (i.e. allowing mobile devices) for this situation to change. Test proctors might have to become more vigilant, but I imagine if airplane mode was strictly enforced, then smartphones might be allowed. Seems that the communications features (which can facilitate cheating) are the primary concern.
54 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI think that was actually the game that got me into programming, to figure out "how did they even do that." (and taught myself in isolation such terrible things as not understanding what a for loop was actually used for, and using it as a time delay loop.)
Man that game was great.
I was also notorious for bringing a slide rule into tests in case the batteries ran out on the calculator.
If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)?
The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT.
Edit: Casio in the article competes on price.
[1] http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy Five different brands have at least 3 approved graphing calculators for the SATs.
This was a pain, and it was compounded by the fact that the HP-48 didn't have the same features as the TI-89, so I was frequently out of luck. The teacher wrote his homeworks and tests with an eye towards what was doable without too much effort on a TI-89, and I imagine that the TI people chose the featureset for the 89 with an eye towards what people would want to do in high school classes, so using anything else was an uphill battle.
(We also had occasional homeworks in Excel, and I ran into the same trouble trying to do them in Perl. It didn't help that I was very far from an expert in either Perl or the HP-48g.)
It was obvious that if you didn't have the calculator that everyone else has, you might as well not even bring the book to class. You spent more time trying to find the equivalent settings and processes to do the work than actually getting anything done.
A competitor would have to include the exact same formulas in the exact same menu locations.
I remember a 'calculator Olympics' involving solving an incredible half-page calculation involving scores of parentheses and transcendental functions. Everybody else launched into typing all that into their TI calculator. I started from the innermost expression (as ALL RPN-trained people do). It was an identity. Hm. As I worked my way out, everything was an identity (sin(90) etc). I got the answer without ever touching a button on my calculator.
THAT's what math class should be teaching.
All the years of using it with physics homework and statistics homework and whatnot has wired its usage into my brain.
Sure, I could use R or Python, but when all I need to do is some simple math the calculator is always faster. It has tactile buttons I can operate with one hand, a clear readable screen, and a battery that lasts long. And it's simple.
If mine broke I'd buy another one.
Incredible that TI still reigns supreme.
How about a bigger screen, more memory and a faster chip? I get that there still exists a calculator niche, but come on, it doesn't mean you just don't even try!
As far as disrupting goes, I use TyDig on my iPad as my most often used "calculator" these days. The 92 doesn't come out much. But for the market (high school) it is hard to beat the combination of features and cost that a calculator brings to the table.
What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.
It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.
This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems.
The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.
What happens when one kid writes a quadratic solver and gives it to half the class?
I probably gave my teachers too much credit, but the classes that could use calculators were usually taught by teachers who knew about programming the things.
Our professor didn't worry about cheating, he just designed the tests while keeping in mind probably every student had written notes on their calculator. In fact, he allowed us to have all our notes and books with us while performing the test, just like you would do in the real world when tackling a difficult problem.
http://education.ti.com/en/us/products/calculators/graphing-...
She showed her students, everyone poked at it for a bit, and then it was never used again. It didn't provide much additional educational use.
That would be an epic fail. Like most of us, I carried around a 4-pack of AAA for my calc (at least thats what the TI-81 took) and if the battery finally ran out during a test, no problem, 30 seconds later you're back on the air. Also the teachers sold batteries or you could bum them off a neighbor. With rechargeable, I guess you just fail?
Also rechargables are carefully value engineered to fail after a couple years, so that would increase costs quite a bit. A school system that bought a couple TI84 a decade ago can keep on using them today with COTS walmart batteries, but sealed rechargables means they would have to keep buying them every couple years. With careful value engineering the mfgr could likely get the lifetime down to a bit over a year, and sell kids a new calc every single august for school.
Note that these calcs, at least the TI-81, were not like smartphones. A set of batteries lasted at least a couple months even with some game playing. I wrote some text adventures and others wrote little arcade games and still we got over a month at a time. The -81 was extremely crude as a programming language even compared to 1980s home computer BASICs.
Having a computer algebra system in my handheld calculator got me all the way from pre-algebra to intro diff eq in high school. It's hard to say whether it was unfair, but being able to try algebra and calculus things out on the CAS really helped me explore and understand concepts.
"Apple sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory"
I tend to let it slide when people get memory and storage confused, but I hold journalists to a higher standard. This isn't even a semantic error; this came right after describing the RAM capacity of a TI-84 Plus C Silver. Nothing Matt McFarland wrote in this article was wrong, but it certainly wasn't highly-informed either...
Comparing TI calculators to consumer electronics is a rather moot point. It's better to compare against the plummeting costs of microcomputers in general. The Raspberry Pi is better proof that TI is marking their products up 1000%+! Nobody needs a calculator with a 1GHz processor and 512GB of RAM, and 8-128GB of flash storage, so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?
Because TI has tried in the past to introduce more powerful calculators, and that fell flat.
The 84 exists because schools expect it. That is all. Until they accept your smartphone as a calculator, TI can markup the 84 as much as they want and everyone has to buy it because there is no free market in school calculators.
A TI calculator fast enough to run NumPy to build simulations and interactive gizmos would be super cool though. Allowing students to build colorful mathematical animations and physics simulations using simple building blocks would be awesome. Of course that can all be done with laptops but having things in the palm of your hand shouldn't be underestimated.
When I was in junior high (in France) it was about 50/50 between TI and Casio. In high school a few kids had an HP48. The rare time there was something specific to do with the calculator (eg. calculating sequences) the teacher would ask one geek from each camp to explain to the class how to do it with calculators of that brand.
I'm old enough that my vocational training in high school math classes was on the venerable yet new at that time TI-81. That vocational training was not terribly useful in university classes, the rot had not reached that high (at that time)
Graphing calculators were the first mass market mobile computers under $200 with what you could almost refer to as an app store, via ticalc.org (oh how many hours I spent on there). The interfaces had to be easy to use with low resolution screens and usually four directional buttons. Apps had to be about content. Games were pretty fun.
My TI-89 has survived 11 years. It's survived bike falls, being thrown across the room several times (when I was too quick to grab it and it went flying out of the cover). I use it infrequently but the batteries haven't been changed in over a year. I still have more screen real estate when I am typing on it than I do with my iPhone 5 (both in vertical and landscape). It has actual buttons and I have muscle memory so I don't even have to look at it when I type in numbers and symbols.
I have a periodic table app on my TI-89 that has been on there since 2003. The information someone in chemistry or physics needs is quicker to access than http://www.ptable.com or wikipedia. I'm sure there are apps on an iPod that are probably better now, but an iPod's batteries don't last months.
What could usurp it? Something in the same form factor that can last 48+ hours and take AA or AAA batteries. Something that provides temporary instructor override, allowing an instructor to enforce a policy temporarily (i.e. disable the CAS). Something that might integrate well with tools from TI that are out there. Something that's useful from middle school up to engineering/chemistry/physics.
Maybe something e-ink (and/or e-ink buttons), plastic, ARM or Atmel, Linux, python and some sort of CAS (Mathematica/Maple branded) by default, with an App store/ecosystem. Something $50-$75. WiFi only, but off by default. Something that probably looks a bit like a nokia n800 or blackberry. I think that would be reasonable.
I've been waiting for years for TI to make a graphing calc smartphone app, but with margins such as those described in the article, why would they? It'll likely take a major shift in the testing standards (i.e. allowing mobile devices) for this situation to change. Test proctors might have to become more vigilant, but I imagine if airplane mode was strictly enforced, then smartphones might be allowed. Seems that the communications features (which can facilitate cheating) are the primary concern.