![]() For that matter most kids are going to be fine with the cell phone as-is, which, I might remind you, also frequently has dedicated numeric keys and enough other repurposeable keys to get you quite a ways. But I would be quite sure the average student would be happy to use the keypad and on-screen buttons for sin, cos, tan, e^x, and the two or three other things they actually use in school. Not good enough? Tack a few more keys on and sell it for $30 instead. "What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys?"Īn arbitrarily-small laptop of your choice, up to and including cell phones, plus one of these. Almost anything a good calculator can do, it will do better than a general-purpose machine. What is clear is that you can't judge the entire concept of a handheld graphing calculator based solely on the models that weren't meant to be useful. I don't think it's clear which is the cause and which is the effect. Nobody is designing or marketing calculators to engineers anymore, and engineers are for the most part not using handheld calculators as much as they used to. They do this by offering standardized platforms, fully locked-down to assuage teachers' fears about kinds of cheating that shouldn't even help on a properly designed math test, and they partner with textbook authors and publishers to integrate their model's functionality in to the "curriculum". TI and Casio are competing to see who can better enable bad teaching methods. The current reality in the calculator market is that calculators are designed for and marketed to teachers who train their students to be machines that operate calculators. (Astute readers will have guessed this based on my use of an HP calculator as an example.) It has nothing to do with the current markets. Of course, the above is only why we should be continuing to use and develop graphing calculators. (I will occasionally actually use a 50g emulator on my desktop for some of the tasks that are a bit cumbersome without a full QWERTY keyboard, but still suck with native software.) MATLAB et al are basically worthless for short computations even if you do keep them running at all times, and while they are both faster for large computations and have more features, they aren't as interactive and simpler functions are take too many keystrokes to get to when compared with my calculator. It turns on instantly, has a pretty good keyboard layout, and even though the screen resolution is monochrome 131x80, it makes good use of the whole screen to display just what I'm working on. Even the graphing calculators that have QWERTY keyboards also a dedicated number pad and a bunch of other keys.Įven though I have a full-size 109-key keyboard and a pair of monitors totaling over 4 megapixels, and I have MATLAB, Mathematica, and a bunch of other math programs installed, I still keep my HP-50g on my desk right under my monitor. A graphing calculator should have a keyboard that is designed not around general-purpose text entry, but around entering math. What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys? It's probably bigger than any netbook. Why not just put Mathematica on a netbook? Aside from the fact that a netbook is 3-5 times larger and thus less portable, it's all about the user interface. Graphing calculators aren't pointless, but most people using them are missing the point. ![]() That's not to say that the educational vendors give bad customer service, but at the same time, providing the end-users (the students) with a quality product at a reasonable price is hardly the primary concern. With regards to education, the involved parties operate much like Oracle and the other "complete systems" vendors in the enterprise world: buy influence with the decision-makers and their subordinates, keep up the hard sell until the contract is won and then maintain the sell to ensure future business. Given the number of high school math textbooks with extra sections for use with calculators and recommendations of a particular brand of calculator, it's hard to imagine that TI isn't marketing to the textbook companies as well. In return, the school pays for classroom sets of calculators, training for teachers and proprietary software and hardware that interfaces directly with the calculator for use in math and science classes. My wife's school has its own TI Vendor who makes sure to come by every month or two with free goodies for the teachers (and frequently hosts events with free drinks for the teachers and give-aways, including free calculators.) TI also has an educator conference that it encourages member schools to pay for teachers to attend. The problem here is that the mathematics education industry is bought and paid for by educational vendors in general and Texas Instruments in particular.
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