Are graphical calculators pointless?

http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=3418

by pwg • 15 years ago

47 44 15 years ago

This drives me nuts. I am in grad school and had to go buy a TI-82 because my stats professor was convinced that a TI-81 was completely different than a TI-82. I dropped $125 for one course and I now know that I could have used what I had.

Further more. I had to buy another antiquated calculator for my finance class that cost me $75.

In the modern world, I should have been able to buy each of these for about $5 as an app on my phone.

Don't get me started on the bookstore and textbooks.

Jach• 15 years ago

http://www.spacetime.us/iphone/

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

Say what you want about the price, but the HP-12c remains one of the most useful and nicest pieces of hardware I have ever had the pleasure of owning.

That thing will last a lifetime too, they're tanks.

wtallis7• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, you do have to replace the batteries every few years, so they're not perfect.

(I've owned a 15c for 3-4 years and have not yet replaced the batteries. My dad has replaced the batteries in his 12c about 5 times in the past 20 years.)

nickbp• 15 years ago

I love my TI-89, which I got ~7 years ago for college physics/astro classes, and still use fairly often when the need arises, typically once or twice a month. I find the interface of a physical calculator to be far superior to a more general purpose machine when facing the tasks its built for.

However, I also think they're way overpriced for what they are. I think a lot of the price is just 'because we can'.

AdamTReineke• 15 years ago

Are there patents that prevent competition? Why do TI's overpriced calculators have to be the standard?

city41• 15 years ago

It doesn't feel like a very lucrative space to compete in these days.

wtallis7• 15 years ago

They've set up a great lock-in system. They've bought off all the schools and teachers to get them to require students to use a specific TI model, and then they get the schools to buy textbooks that are written to use the TI calculators, with examples that give keystroke-by-keystroke instructions, and sample programs written in that model's dialect of BASIC. Sometimes they even get the standardized tests to require a specific calculator.

It's a great deal for lazy teachers: not only do they not have to teach their students how to perform the calculation, they don't even have to teach the student how to use their calculator to do it. If a student wants to use a different model, they're on their own. They'll have to learn the TI BASIC anyways, because the textbook doesn't even try to do a decent job of describing an algorithm in any other notation.

In most cases, breaking TI's monopoly would be as difficult as, and possibly require, busting a teachers' union.

wtallis7• 15 years ago

Graphing calculators aren't pointless, but most people using them are missing the point. (And TI likes it that way.)

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. 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. A graphing calculator should have a keyboard that is designed not around general-purpose text entry, but around entering math. Even the graphing calculators that have QWERTY keyboards also a dedicated number pad and a bunch of other keys.

Even 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. 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. 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. (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.)

------

Of course, the above is only why we should be continuing to use and develop graphing calculators. It has nothing to do with the current markets. (Astute readers will have guessed this based on my use of an HP calculator as an example.)

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. TI and Casio are competing to see who can better enable bad teaching methods. 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".

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. I don't think it's clear which is the cause and which is the effect. 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. Almost anything a good calculator can do, it will do better than a general-purpose machine.

jerf2• 15 years ago

"What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys?"

An arbitrarily-small laptop of your choice, up to and including cell phones, plus one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PAUK10U-Ultra-Mini-Keypad/dp/B0...

Not good enough? Tack a few more keys on and sell it for $30 instead. 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. 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.

(Still not enough keys? Try turning on num lock on your netbook's keyboard. Most still have them. Then bind the other keys to useful functions. It may not be optimal but with only a bit of practice it probably won't be a stopper. The keyboard is your slave, not your master.)

Yes, this won't permit very fast entry, but you and I (mmm, sweet sweet RPN) are not the norm. Go look at your average TI-82 user; IIRC, they are hunting and pecking those keyboards anyhow.

To be honest I swing the other way myself; eliminate them entirely. But at least 15 years ago when I bought my HP-48G for very similar amounts of money I was actually getting something. If we are going to be turning out these calculators, they ought to be $30, not $130.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

There's no Mathematica app or equivalent for the iPhone?

dfox• 15 years ago

It is not only about keyboard, but about general user interface. It's probably highly subjective, but Ti-89's OS is probably only CAS that I have ever seen that is really easy to use (at least for me).

But on the other hand, while I used to have some kind of calculator always at hand, I mostly eliminated that recently as to minimize amount of stuff I'm carrying around and use my smartphone (Python on Symbian is pretty good approximation of scientific calculator, modulo some input problems) or random REPL windows instead.

wtallis7• 15 years ago

Why buy a netbook and an add-on keypad if the user interface is still going to be the bottleneck? The CPUs in current generation calculators are fast enough for basically any undergraduate use case. (With better software, the HP's 75Mhz CPU would be able to keep up with any computation task that makes sense for a device with a small screen.)

Yes, they ought to be a lot cheaper, but I think your target of $30 isn't quite realistic. Good keyboards aren't cheap, and neither are chips with power consumption low enough for running off AAAs. Certainly, if you want a high-contrast high-resolution screen and a lot of RAM, you'll be looking at a lot more than $30.

ugh2• 15 years ago

The iPad (and other tablets) can have arbitrary keys. I see great potential in tablets for replacing graphing calculators. They have all the right specs, they are portable and their UIs can very much surpass that of traditional graphing calculators, especially when it comes to data entry. (My only problem is that I despise all the existing apps because they are so damn ugly. They offend my sensibilities. That's probably just me, though.)

wtallis7• 15 years ago

Tactile feedback actually tends to matter for data entry. Back when people actually cared about the quality of their calculators and there was real competition, the quality and durability of the keyboards was one of the most important features of a calculator.

The flexibility of an iPad's screen might be able to offset the lack of tactile feedback, but it would have to be a very well-designed piece of software. I know of no such app, though I would love to hear about one. Unfortunately, given the poor and stagnant user interfaces for both desktop applications like Mathematica and MATLAB, and TI's graphing calculators, I doubt that anyone with significant resources is doing the necessary UI research.

bbq• 15 years ago

Is there anyway to use your HP-50g (or equivalent) as an input device to your computer? I couldn't find anything other than the minimally featured HP CalcPad [1] and TI's offering in the wrong direction [2]

Is there a market for something like this?

[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/calculator/Office/1/store... [2] http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDeta...

nitrogen• 15 years ago

You could find or write a program that uses the TI calcualtors' link port to send keystrokes to the computer via a USB or parallel port adapter. I made a parallel port adapter in junior high or high school (can't remember exactly when) to load games and math aids onto my TI-85 and later TI-89, and the interface could definitely be used for sending keyboard commands with the right software on both ends.

Edit: it may also be possible to interface to an iPhone through the audio jack, and it would definitely be possible to use the IOIO (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423609) to interface with Android.

killedbydeath• 15 years ago

I am really curious what skill are those calculators teaching. I grew up in a country where they were not used, and I went to a math-oriented high school, and math grad school. We had math problems designed for paper which taught us how to think. We had math problems where we had to use advanced numeric methods, because that's what most real life problems are like. Where is the need for something in between coming from?

6ren• 15 years ago

BTW: the eee PC has num lk, which transforms part of its keyboard into a numeric keypad plus operators. Still not ideal of course.

jwuphysics• 15 years ago

This has also bothered me for quite awhile. I think what nails the ridiculousness of graphical calculators is illustrated in this comic: http://xkcd.com/768/

Seriously, though, as a student in CMU, and as a astrophysics major, I can attest to how unnecessary these calculators are. As long as it can perform trigonometry and logarithms, it satisfies the need.

I like the author's idea of using "locked-down" netbooks instead. After all, a netbook installed with Mathematica or MATLAB will be much more similar to academia/industry level calculators.

VengefulCynic• 15 years ago

The problem here is that the mathematics education industry is bought and paid for by educational vendors in general and Texas Instruments in particular. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

Rote memorization and learning processes is what's important in today's education system. Not learning, inference and discovery of new knowledge.

forkandwait2• 15 years ago

Money, money, money is what is important. Kids would be better served by chalk, pencil, and teachers with masters in their fields, rather than bullshit technology and "teacher training", but nobody makes a pile that way.

compuguy3• 15 years ago

I'm going to stop you there. Not everyone can learn though wrote memorization. People learn in different ways. Second, do you remember every proof and formula (excluding ones used reguarly)? We are taught to understand and apply these things, not to spend 90 percent of our time learning them for one or two classes.

wtallis7• 15 years ago

"Not everyone can learn though rote memorization. People learn in different ways."

That doesn't mean that current mathematics teaching methods take that in to account. Try looking in a current middle-school or high-school math textbook. I think you'll be surprised, and disappointed.

When I was learning high-school level math, I found that the quality and usefulness of a math textbook was inversely proportional to the probability of the public schools using it (and, perhaps not too coincidentally, the colorfulness of the textbook).

In recent years, my local schools tried to get away from a rote curriculum by replacing it with a curriculum that basically eschewed teaching, instead relying on "guided discovery" or something like that. It didn't help the standardized test scores or the students' mastery of what they were supposed to learn.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

I'm not encouraging what I listed above. Quite the contrary, I find it to be awful. I don't learn through memorization. I learn programming well, chemistry well, math well. I can't remember or "learn" history for the life of me. At best, I might retain major concepts if I can relate them to me very personally, but even then it's usually very vague.

My comment was meant as critical not as praise for the current system. I think it's horribly ineffective as you note

teuobk• 15 years ago

I'm fond of my TI-89, but I keep it around for nostalgia more than anything else. (Serial number 750, manufactured July 1998, purchased new. Ah, memories.) When it breaks, I won't be replacing it.

When I do use it, it tends to be for simple arithmetic.

theatrus2• 15 years ago

I still have mine. Great little calculator, and the CAS is actually quite competent.

forkandwait2• 15 years ago

Maybe not pointless, but I am thankful I took my math classes when we still had to memorize the shape of the important functions and what happened when you did a + f(x-b) to f(x).

Well, I guess I think they are pointless, but I would be that teacher that doesn't let anyone use calculators at all, at least until 9th grade. Graphs are very useful in analyzing data, but then you want a real software package. But for learning math, honestly I think you get more by exercising doing lots of problems, memorizing the key facts (yes, memorizing), and drawing your own damn graphs (get off my lawn you kids!).

robryan• 15 years ago

In the classroom setting there are a few more reasons why they are appealing, relative to a computer they are less distracting (although there are still games for them) and they can be used in tests without to much fear of them being misused for teaching. They also allow a teacher to learn one tool and be able to help students rather than having to deal with varying hardware configurations and maths programs.

onedognight• 15 years ago

While the author has a point that calculators are essentially pointless (if not downright scammy) these day, I know more than a few people learned to program on their HP calculators. It was my first experience learning the ins and outs of an entire API, eventually deciding it wasn't sufficient and then digging deeper into the previously hidden world of the firmware below and eventually to the CPU itself. Of course you can do that on any device, but it was helpful be able to play around in class without suspicion.

boredguy8• 15 years ago

I learned assembly on my TI calculator while I was bored in math class. But that doesn't seem like a reason to keep the calculators: whatever ends up in its place can also be where people 'learn to program', and it might even be better to learn in another environment.

gamble• 15 years ago

I carry a $20 Casio that's light and small enough to go unnoticed in my bag, while providing better tactile response than a smartphone calculator. For anything more substantial I break out MATLAB.

The problem with graphing calculators is that they're autistic. With MATLAB it's trivial to load a data file, run some calculations, generate plots, and export to PDF for use in a document. Graphing calculators are fine for working through problem sets in high school, but outside school they fall in an awkward gap between being too big and heavy to carry around and too limited for real work.

iofthestorm• 15 years ago

I hope the author realizes that TI does a ton more than make graphing calculators... they're probably one of the biggest manufacturers of ICs out there (about to swallow National Semiconductor or something).

andrewaylett• 15 years ago

If you're using an Android phone, you can get a really nice graphical calculator app. Now called "Andy-83", you can probably guess which major semiconductor company asked its developer to change its name a few weeks ago...

http://www.supware.net/android/andy-83/

No interest to declare: just a happy user :). I don't need to use a calculator very often -- when I do I am much more likely to have my phone on me than to be anywhere near a 'real' calculator.

jff• 15 years ago

I got a TI-86 my freshman year of highschool, taught myself the BASIC dialect, etc. Useful machine with a nice menu system (menus sit at the bottom of the screen, rather than modally filling the screen like a TI-82/83/84).

I fell in love with RPN at my first internship, where I noticed a lot of the (mechanical) engineers used HP-12 calculators for most everything. I later bought an HP-48 and, eventually, an HP-50G. To my mind, the HP graphing calculators are the Unix of the calculator world, while TI calcs are more like Windows. Most people use TI, but the HP calculators have a longer lineage, a great if somewhat noob-unfriendly interface, and more powerful hardware (75 MHz ARM processor, 2 MB of storage/512 KB of RAM, SD card slot, and the higher-quality HP keyboard).

I haven't used my calculator in a while, but I think that's largely because I'm working with operating systems at the moment and don't need to do more than integer arithmetic. I occasionally reach for my Android phone with the HP-48 app on it, but without being able to feel the keys under my fingers it is sadly lacking.

Are graphical calculators pointless?

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