Texas Instruments new TI-84 Plus CE Python graphing calculator

https://news.ti.com/texas-instruments-new-ti-84-plus-ce-python-graphing-calculator-introduces-students-to-programming

by kensai • 5 years ago

43 69 5 years ago

news.ti.com

daniel_iversen• 5 years ago

Specs and features: https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...

eu• 5 years ago

And the guides: https://education.ti.com/guidebook/details/en/1424CF4F539A4D...

Gys• 5 years ago

Available fall 2021.
This next-generation model replaces the TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator.

boricj5• 5 years ago

Next-generation? They've just glued a 48MHz Cortex-M0+ ARM micro-controller with 32 KiB of RAM on the motherboard to act as a co-processor for executing CircuitPython. It's basically a TI-84 Plus CE from 2015 with the TI-Python adapter from 2019 built-in.

Given the co-processor's lack of performance and the fact that it's connected through an UART channel, it's just about the slowest, weakest Python implementation in a calculator out there... It's been four years since the introduction of the NumWorks calculator and its Python capabilities and that's the best they can do?

mkoryak• 5 years ago

They don't really need to do better. They are TI and have a monopoly for "calculators required for class".

I have a TI89 from 20 years ago and it still works for doing math from 2021.

the-dude• 5 years ago

Such an odd product space at this time, they'll probably never be used outside of education.

ceejayoz2• 5 years ago

"Millions of school children will be required to get one every year" is a pretty decent market.

eli• 5 years ago

As is "on a short list of devices that can be used during certain standardized exams"

ubermonkey• 5 years ago

Yeah, this.

The adding-Python big screams desperation a little.

irl_• 5 years ago

I have a TI-83 and an HP 19B II and both see regular enough use that they live on my desks (one at home, one in the office) rather than in the drawer. The calculator on my phone sucks (no history, difficult to enter anything more complex than adding up a few numbers) and I don't even know how to calculator on my Mac (because I never had a need to).

I use the calculator as an extension to my brain, it has a little memory and a lot of quick compute available, I know how it works well enough that it's all muscle memory and invisible to my conscious processing.

If quality scientific/business calculators ever go away I'll be sad.

crmrc114• 5 years ago

Why don't they offer a paid app with their calculator emulated? I keep my various calculator emulators on Android because I love the ease of all my custom TI apps. Would be really nice if they just made a decent Android application for all the engineers out there like me.

ceejayoz2• 5 years ago

Why don't they offer a paid app with their calculator emulated?

Because their main market isn't permitted to have phones on their desks during tests.

luke2m• 5 years ago

Exactly. If I was not required to, I would never have bought a TI. Gnome Plots or desmos are just so much more convenient.

baumandm2• 5 years ago

I'm guessing they view releasing an official calculator app as a move towards eventually replacing the hardware calculator. It could help legitimize a cell phone calculator to schools and exam boards.

I'm also guessing their product margins are better on hardware than they would be on software, since there are so many other calculator apps available. The market of people who want a TI-branded calculator app on Android or iOS is a lot smaller than the captive student market.

IMHO eventually the tides will shift and school districts and exams will start allowing cell phones, and I imagine just before that happens they will suddenly discover they have a nice Android/iOS app ready to launch.

JohnBooty2• 5 years ago

    IMHO eventually the tides will shift and school
    districts and exams will start allowing cell phones,

Why would this happen, and why would it be a good thing?

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

IMHO eventually the tides will shift and school districts and exams will start allowing cell phones

I doubt that will happen as an allowed accessory device, but what will happen, I expect, both school-issued and standardized exams will move from exams for which you can use an accessory calslculating device to online exams done on (possibly standardized, definitely closely monitored) computers which will have calculator utilities installed (possibly integrated into the exam), rendering dedicated educational calculators superfluous.

rtkwe5• 5 years ago

One of the main reasons the physical calculators still exist is for schools where students use them during tests. Allowing people to have phones or any internet connected device during a test is a recipe for massive cheating.

Schools would have to get into the constant cat and mouse game any parental control software maker gets into to have a chance to stop it and that fight usually goes to the students rather than the adults trying to lock the device down.

tzs• 5 years ago

One of the nice things about a real calculator is it is easy to enter numbers and do basic operations on them without looking. That's usually quite a bit harder on an emulated calculator on a touch-screen device due to the lack of tactile feedback.

I wonder if one could make some sort of overlay that you can put on top of the touchscreen when used an emulated calculator to help with that?

One approach could simply have a cover over the virtual keyboard area, with holes in the cover over the virtual keys. This would give you some tactile feedback when moving between keys.

Fancier would be a cover with actual push buttons that when pushed touch the screen with something that will register on touchscreens.

To make it really fancy, also have an "On" button that rather than touching the screen uses Bluetooth LE to communicate with something on the phone that launches or switches to the calculator that matches the keyboard overlay.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Didn’t they recently remove the ability to run native Z80 binaries in some of their calculators because of concerns of cheating software being distributed? I imagine this will be a pretty locked down Python environment.

jbluepolarbear• 5 years ago

My brother used to make C programs and trade them to other kids for $5. He had one for Algebra 2, Physics, and Pre-Calc. Teachers started wiping calculators before tests, but didn’t remove the binary programs he made. Became a big deal.

mattwad• 5 years ago

I made an app that showed a fake 'wiped data' screen. Teachers wouldn't think to actually watch me delete the apps lol

bernardv• 5 years ago

It’s been available in Europe for many years.

adenner• 5 years ago

What version of python will it be? How complete will it be? Also, will you be able to add packages from pip via USB cable?

rtkwe5• 5 years ago

A version of Python 3 based off of CircuitPython that they've tweaked.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/20/python-snakes-its-way-t...

MPSimmons2• 5 years ago

Mine is 3.4

Tempest19812• 5 years ago

More comments here (3 months ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27084879 (158 comments)

MPSimmons2• 5 years ago

I have one of these. It's essentially Circuit Python (3.4). It has a limited number of libraries, but overall, it's pretty cool. You can include other python files on the calculator, so you can bring your own libraries if you need to.

sparkling• 5 years ago

Input via the keyboard? Sounds like a rather painful experience.

rel2thr• 5 years ago

A language with significant white space seems suboptimal for a device with a small screen .

I remember fondly my wall of text no indentation TI basic programs

linux2647• 5 years ago

Good use case for using tabs and setting a low tab size. But still

reasonabl_human• 5 years ago

It blows my mind that TI has such a stranglehold on the educational calculator market. Producing a TI-84 must be a few bucks vs. the >$100 they sold them for when I was in school.

Does anybody know of open source alternatives that could be pushed in the classroom? There’s no way they can patent math..

dharmab• 5 years ago

They didn't patent math. They survive for a few reasons:

- Standardized testing calculator requirements are crafted in such a way that graphing calculators are allowed by specific model: https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines...

- Textbooks contain instructions on using TI calculators (and sometimes, if you're very lucky, Casio). Teachers can only provide personal instruction with TI because that's what the schools buy (presumably thanks to marketing and dealmaking).

Math classes are already hard for high schoolers. Having to deal with the disadvantage of being on a different platform from your peers is hard.

rdtwo• 5 years ago

The problem is that once you hit college you have to give the calculator up and use the scientific calculator for 2 years in the weedout classes

axegon_• 5 years ago

Does anybody know of open source alternatives that could be pushed in the classroom?

I have no idea to be honest but they wouldn't be that hard to make given the wide choice of portable computational power. Surely wouldn't be all that complicated to 3d print a housing and shove a rpi zero in there or some of it's most powerful cousins. That said, with all the parts and effort I doubt it would come a whole lot cheaper.

boricj5• 5 years ago

There's the NumWorks calculator with its emphasis on modern UI/UX and their source code is available on GitHub, but it's not open-source and they recently had to lock things down because of issues with some particularly obtuse national exam boards in Europe about the openness of their platform...

Otherwise there's also Casio with the Graph-3E+E II and the Graph-90+E (European models, I'm not familiar with the American ones) and HP with the HP Prime, but they all run proprietary firmwares.

There's also SwissMicros with their DM42 calculator where they recently split and open-sourced their Free42-based application from their proprietary operating system for GPL licensing reasons. But they target the engineering market and they don't have Press-To-Test capability.

There are competitors out there and the graphical calculator market situation is far healthier in Europe than North America. But to break TI's monopoly over there you'd need to somehow break their T³ (Teachers Teaching with Technology) lobbyist program and their hold on teacher unions, textbooks and politics...

naikrovek• 5 years ago

there are many calculators which are suitable and approved for classroom and usage in standardized tests, and most are not TI models.

TI enjoys market dominance thanks to teachers knowing them well and wanting to have a single teaching experience for all students, rather than having 25 students and 25 different sets of instructions per class.

Tempest19812• 5 years ago

Desmos? https://www.desmos.com/

Or a $16 Casio fx-115ES plus? https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

pdpi2• 5 years ago

Graphing calculators for school use infuriate me.

For the price of a calculator[0] you can instead buy an entry-level Chromebook[1]. You would get a general purpose-ish computer instead of a highly specialised, highly limited, woefully underpowered device. It feels like a weird case of regulatory capture.

    0. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Texas-Instruments-84PLCE-TBL-2E5/dp/B01086MEM2/
    1. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-Chromebook-3120-3120-7898-Resolution/dp/B016DP0XUW/

markus_zhang• 5 years ago

But maybe someone has a contract with some schools so it's good money.

dotcommand• 5 years ago

People in the UK are forced to buy these calculators also? Thought it was an exclusively US racket. Another hit to american exceptionalism.

With the rise of smartphones, I figured I was part of the last generation forced to buy these overpriced TI calculators. It's so sad to see this racket going strong today.

You spend $100 ( a lot of money to most people ) on a useless device that you don't ever use again. Never once in college or thereafter have I used my TI calculator.

seidoger• 5 years ago

Calculators are still distraction-free. They're a purpose-build device.

Our exams in engineering school took into account we could solve 5 equations/unknowns problems with our TI-92 Plus (at the time).

Can't imagine students with Chromebooks during exams (edit: or maybe I'm just from a different time)

pdpi2• 5 years ago

There's good reasons to having a dedicated, more limited device.

What bothers me is that the device is a hard requirement for students, which means TI and Casio get to charge unreasonable amounts of money for these calculators that are not reflective of what they'd otherwise be worth. I brought up the Chromebook not so much as a suggested alternative, but as a benchmark for what sort of hardware you can get for the same money when your market isn't completely tied to your product.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

"Python is a programming language that is easy to get started with, good for beginners"

I couldn't disagree more. In my experience, Python is a terribly difficult language for anyone who doesn't already have a solid grasp on common programming concepts. Its syntax is easy to read, but it's chuck-full of features and optimized for experienced developers, not beginners.

For example, consider a simple counting loop in C...

  for(int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    printf("%d\n", i);
  }

That code is a little obtuse, but what it does is very simple. The `for` loop requires three statements - initialization, condition, and iterator. The initialization statement (int i = 0) is only called at the beginning of the loop and is used to define our variable (in this case, i).

Next the `for` loop executes the condition statement. If the condition evaluates to true, it executes the body of the loop, then the iterator statement, then jumps back to the condition and tries again. If the condition evaluates to false, it moves on to the next line of code after the `for` loop.

In this case, our loop initializes i as 0. The condition `i < 5` means the loop will execute the body until i >= 5. The body simply prints the value of i and, after the body is executed each time, the loop executes our iterator statement which increments i by 1.

So long as you understand variables, conditions, arithmetic operators, and the `printf()` function you can figure out a `for` loop in C. Now consider the same thing in Python...

  for i in range(5):
    print(i)

That code is pretty easy to read, but what does it do? The `for` loop is used to iterate over an "iterable" object, which is a collection of multiple values. The body of the loop is executed for each value in the collection and assigns i a value from the collection for each iteration. In this case, our collection is output by the call to `range(5)`. The body of our loop simply prints the value of i.

What's an object? An object is a thing with attributes (variable within the object) and methods (functions within the object). Objects can be values of variables just like any primitive value.

What does range do? The builtin function `range` outputs a generator which yields values from the minimum (default 0) to the maximum (in this case 5) at a given step (default 1). The minimum is inclusive but the maximum is not so in this case it will yield 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

What's a generator? First we need to define "iterator". An iterator is an object which helps to iterate over a collection of values. All iterators have a special `__next__()` method which returns the next value in the collection. When there are no more values left to iterate over in the collection, the `__next__()` method raises a `StopIteration` exception. A generator is a type of iterator which mimics having a collection but instead of holding a collection of values in memory and iterating over them, it generates each value one-at-a-time only when the `__next__()` method is called. In our case, the generator starts at 0 for the first value and adds 1 to the output each time `__next__()` is called. When it reaches 5, instead of returning it raises the `StopIteration` exception.

What's an exception? An exception is a mechanism for interrupting execution of code. Instead of continuing to the next line of code, an exception causes the program to exit the call stack one level at a time until it either reaches the top or is caught by something. In our case, the `for` loop catches that `StopIteration` exception for us and uses that to know when to stop. Hopefully you know what the call stack is by now.

Yeah, a novice could probably ignore most of this stuff and just take for granted that the body of the loop will get executed for each value in the range 0..n (where n is the value given to `range()`). But this is just one example. Python requires novices to take a lot of things for granted from the start. Its syntax is mostly simple and elegant, but in terms of functionality it hurls developers into the deep end and they often have a hard time staying afloat if they haven't already learned the basics with other languages.

...that said, I'm rather fond of Python and think it's a great fit for programmable calculators for a variety of other reasons. "Good for beginners" just isn't one of them.

boricj5• 5 years ago

You forgot to explain how the CPython interpreter works, how the operating system works, as well as how a computer works, how a modern super-scalar, out-of-order multi-core microprocessor works and the physics behind silicon-based integrated circuits and electronics.

Abstractions are a good thing. When I write that for loop in C, I don't need to worry how the compiler will translate this into an abstract syntax tree, how that tree gets transformed into machine code nor how the microprocessor will interpret and execute it. I just think in terms of the abstract C machine model unless I need to peek under, usually for performance reasons.

If you truly believe in first principles for teaching programming languages, there's Forth, where a minimal implementation is basically a dozen or so of native primitives and an indirect threaded code core, leaving everything else to the programmer (disclaimer: I've never programmed in Forth nor bootstrapped an interpreter). Or Brainfuck if you don't mind a Turing tarpit, but I'd think twice before introducing that as a beginner's first programming language.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

That's not fair. `range()` is a function which outputs something and understanding what that something is is imperative to understanding what that Python code does. I didn't start talking about the internals of `range()` or how the language is interpreted/compiled because none of that is necessary to understanding what the code does.

I'm not just sharing my personal thoughts here. I know half a dozen people who tried and failed to start learning programming with Python. Some of them moved onto other languages and had a better time while others gave up on the skill entirely. This is just what I've learned from discussing the issues they had. I have no reason to disparage Python. It's my favorite language and by far the one I use most.

Texas Instruments new TI-84 Plus CE Python graphing calculator

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