Why are graphing calculators still archaic non-intuitive garbage in the current year?
Graphing calculator apps are light years ahead of "real" graphing calculators, but you can't use them in the classroom.
Why hasn't anyone invented a graphing calculator with touch screen capability that lets you zoom, trace, and find points of intersection without going through a million pixelated menus?
The apps are awesome, they just need the hardware to be installed on besides a cell phone so teachers will allow them.
Why were textbooks always shit? The answer is the wrong people designed tested and (didn't) improve them.
Its a nomoney easytestcorrection affair, but dumb as fuck.
Blake Reyes
>graphing linear functions >uni American education: not even once
James Phillips
Blame Texas Instruments for basically indoctrinating almost every school that matters and having texbook makers still revolve around ti-84s
Jaxon Wood
This isn't for an assignment or anything
Just a quick example so I could have screenshot to post
Oliver Long
it's a combination of multiple factors
1: there are lots textbooks with instructions for specific TI calculators. they want to keep the same layout so that professors will continue instructing their students to buy Texas Instruments specifically rather than a better competitor 2: because of the above situation with textbooks, TI is basically a monopoly and doesn't have to care much about quality or price -- all the high school and uni students are gonna buy their product anyways because the teacher/prof told them to 3. there are standardized tests with rules about "computers" and what is and is not allowed. more advanced calculators can be banned under those rules, and students want to buy a calculator that they can actually take into their SATs.
Parker Cruz
Not only that, we still have calculators with retarded programming languages, no full integrated help/reference down to explaining maths and programs both and all that.
Should really be something like the current modern notebook style CAS (jupyter, sage,beaker...) plus Wikipedia adapted, but its instead a waste of time designed to make sure schools and unis can test who can memorize some shit.
Nathan Sanchez
Probably one of the actual reasons is that a graphing calculator is meant to be a small, low compute power device with long battery life so that you depend on it in the field. No one sane uses them in lab because you have a workstation running MatLab or alternative. If they did what you hope they would then it would defeat both of their main objectives.
Carson Hughes
>more advanced calculators can be banned
This is dumb of them though, because if you're using a calculator you're already using a machine that will give you the answer. Making it harder by forcing students to use outdated technology so the machine gives them the answer slower is pointless if theyre still getting the answer from the machine.
Matthew Powell
Another factor is that TI calculates mostly just work. No fancy glass touch screen to smash, batteries that last half a year, and no software to lock down during tests.
Ryan Kelly
The battery at least is a valid reason
John Green
/thread
Michael Collins
Just about all dumbfuck tests no longer work once people are allowed to do what companies really do and find and fill in a solving function with the right input.
95% what they test is if you can remember the function and erroneous implementations of it and quickly execute a correct variant.
Oh sure, we could instead learn to solve more difficult problems then but then they'd have to acknowledge that designing actual solutions cant just be done in one way in an hour.
Cameron Hill
>Why are graphing calculators still archaic non-intuitive garbage in the current year? Because graphing calculators are marketed at schools, not the people actually using them, and schools don't give a single fuck about how archaic they are.
Samuel Smith
there is literally nothing wrong with a Ti89
Oliver Nguyen
A pretty informative video about all the circumstances that led to this: youtu (.) be/zoGl8-Wc-L0
Jayden Cooper
It can't solve matrices with phasors as the entries.
Evan Morris
To be far if they wanted too they could actually engineer a calculator a very low power arm chip with the usual monochrome LCD with a durable plastic touch screen. It would be easier to use and more speedy than whatever Z80 or 68000 they toss in while still having a years worth of battery life.
Brody Jenkins
>he doesn't use a TI-92
Jackson Adams
no backlight
James Nguyen
Kek that got more yous faster than I thought
Jack White
there's a big difference between "integrate this equation by hand then calculate its value at a specific point using your calculator" versus "type the equation into the calculator and push the auto-integrate button"
Adrian Cooper
Too bad the TI-92 plus or the plus upgrade module is almost impossible to find. Got my non plus version for $20
Landon Green
Because software projects are not funded and developed up front anymore, everything gets released for "free" but perpetually unfinished with built in spying and ads to finance the never ending development cycle. And if by chance a stable version ever comes out, they decide to do a complete rewrite with an "improved" interface that turns everything back to shit.
Adam Phillips
Do we literally never want people to handle anything AS SIMPLE as, say, Jupyter's basic functionality (without coding a great deal of extra stuff) would permit?
Nope. But the schools don't care. "Teaching" and testing memorization of 1-x algorithms to dumbly execute as "Maths" is way easier and you can just take the stance that people who can't do it fast enough are the suckers that simply aren't elite enough. And then it's all good, right?
Jack Reed
Current calculators that we use already do this though
Jose Parker
The difference is one takes more time, and the other will be done on an actual job.
In either case they failed to teach jack shit that is particularly valuable.
Luke Roberts
K, install Matlab or run python
Nolan Russell
the ones that can (like ti89?) are banned on standardized tests
the math shit on shit like the SATs isn't supposed to identify a student's ability to work a job in the real world, it's supposed to test whether the student learned the shit they were supposed to learn in their high school math classes
Caleb Williams
Ya, they also can do step-by-step calculations for debugging and passing tests purposes.
In either case, people should REALLY instead learn how to read and debug and generally work with well-documented maths algorithms running on a CAS. Because these are the ACTUAL devices we work with, and this is the ACTUAL most formal and workable definition and the biggest "collection" of maths we've come up with so far. [The vast majority of books handed to people at school doesn't even qualify as a half-assed attempt to register a tiny fraction of maths or the reasoning behind them and other docs, it's just a full instance of completely giving up.]
But instead, this isn't straight-forward training to teach people to do this at various degrees of sophistication.
We instead mostly try ensure the people who are interested in computers get an elevated social status in exchange for primarily having proven that they can work their asses off and read and write complex stuff quickly and methodically.
Then you just kinda assume that they'll probably learn what they ultimately need to learn so they can tell our computers what maths to do in *some way*. And they succeed, like 60% of the time, which is still great in comparison to everyone else who sucks at practically adapting and using maths on any scale and difficulty.
Alexander Thompson
I find it funny how much cell phones have advanced in the last 10 years and how graphing calculators are literally the same shit I used in high school in 2004.
Hudson Hughes
> it's supposed to test whether the student learned the shit they were supposed to learn in their high school math classes Indeed.
And because they don't care, they're completely failing at teaching people to *work with maths*. We have tons of maths prepared in papers and books, but fuck all of a fraction of people who did the introductions can use the least of it even when you'd hand them these books. All they can do is that one trick they learned, usually even without understanding if they actually are in a valid situation or not to use it in.
Nathan Wood
PS: This is about as effective as replacing our written language with images people should learn to draw perfectly.
HEEEY after 1 month you can now ask your way to the TRAIN station if you draw it just right (which we will test 10 times). Asking your way to the BUS and MONORAIL station is next year (5 tests, and they determine whether you're elite at this or not), and then we no longer care.
This will do as a pretense for "literacy" for society.
Also everyone will be confused and not answer if you're not currently asking while standing on a walkway because that's the limitation of this, but we never really told ya. You may or may not notice something is wrong from context, enjoy life!
The maths taught is so bad that people can't do the equivalent to use a dictionary or a thesaurus or google search and reading context to deal with ANY unknown thing. Never mind looking at an equivalent to a grammar book or manual to know if they did something invalid and fix it.
That is how shit our maths teaching is. People speak three sentences as images, generally never learn another sentence or word. If they try to use another word (say, using markow chains?), they will almost always completely fail to make a correct sentence that works in any situation. It'll be just about completely useless.
Parker Bailey
Battery life.
Do you really want to be plugging in your calc to a charger every night?
Robert Hall
This is a valid point, but there is at least one other factor. TI calculators aren't constructed to be calculators, but as educational tools. This perspective is reflected by TI-84 floating point precision. This device has a precision up to 10^-16, but only up to 10^-10 can be effectively used, as it starts erronously rounding after that and not only in displayed results, but also for variables used by TI-BASIC programs (I suppose it uses full precision to calculate roots and irrational exponents). This is intentional, probably so that typing 0.001 - 0.001 will give 0, but nerfing your precision is a cost no serious calculation tool would make.
>and find points of intersection without going through a million pixelated menus? Wouldn't it be better if you solved it by yourself?
Cameron Hall
>University >Graphing a line
Whelp I guess we see how people like Trump got a degree. Silly burgers.
Nicholas Reyes
They're the same as I used in '93. Cell phones have come a LONG way since then.
Isaac Scott
if you are at the point where you are learning how to solve problems like that, sure
if you already know all that shit and you just need the number out of it so you can keep doing your dynamics homework, no
Jayden Rodriguez
Most graphing calculators are designed for learning, though, see
Matthew Wright
Don't you have to go prep your bull Sven? Don't want your wife fucking an unprepared Somali migrant.
Austin Long
>but you can't use them in the classroom.
found the thing you were looking for op
Dylan Rodriguez
Why didn't these products evolve at all? No market demand?
Same with Casio F-91W. Wtf? Same since the 90s.
Jaxon Gomez
Let me guess, Trump university?
Cooper Barnes
>but you can't use them in the classroom. What scenario would there be where you cannot use a computer but you can use a calculator?
When I learned basic arithmetic, we had exams where we had parts that should be solved without any aid. But the as soon as we went on to more complicated mathematics, using aids was not just allowed, it was encouraged. In the real world, most problems are solved numerically.
Jason Murphy
every university is trump university now bitch
Ethan Flores
>"type the equation into the calculator and push the auto-integrate button" My Casio can do that shit and it's allowed everywhere. At least here in Spain.
Aaron Jones
If you go to a real university they don't allow calculators of any kind in math courses.
Carter Murphy
>REAL X There we go again with this bullshit.
Sebastian Reed
if you take real math courses you won't need a calculator in the first place because you won't be working with numerals at all :^)
Ryan Taylor
>purchased graph 89 is on fdroid
Jace Lopez
In my school (Austria) we use geogebra. Pretty good imo. But i'm talking about their desktop version
Oliver Miller
I remember using my TI to integrate equations and if you really care you can write programs to solve general classes of problems, and install another OS to hide it/fake the "wiped everything" screen