I love how the answer given to this problem is more funding. Such an indication of what's wrong with modern education. This entire article is exposing the TI monopoly on calculators, getting 85-90% profit margins, and our solution is to strike to get taxpayer money to keep paying for the things? We should encourage competition.
Consider - an app that replicates this functionality on the phone, but tracks if the user at any point closes the app. This then is reported to the teacher so the teacher knows if there was any cheating.
On the other hand, you have a product that has been identical for the past 25 years or so, that just about every high schooler in america has at one point or another temporarily.
The used market must be absolutely massive, larger than any other piece of consumer electronics. No wonder TI can't budge from their pricing. These things also do not break. I've left mine out in a blizzard. You throw them at a wall and you will find your ti84 sitting happily embedded in a crater in the drywall.
Every attempt to prevent cheating in that way is a huge pain full of edge cases and false positives, and is usually ineffective. Would be better to either embrace technology and accept that the internet is a possible source of help or go manual/mechanical, but trying to artificially limit a cell phone or laptop is doomed from the start.
t. Student who’s had to deal with lockdown browser and similar school-specific proprietary malware.
What about a government mandated price ceiling? Anyone can bid to be the official supplier or calculators, as long as they sell to the government wholesale at a maximum of $20 (or whatever is a good price).
I could see maybe allowing an app on a locked down tablet provided by the school and wiped before the exam. Still a big hardware and IT burden. And you need to lock the student in the app, not record if they close it, because it's so easy to accidentally switch apps with a stray finger or misplaced muscle memory.
Bring your own device sounds like a mess. Someone would create an app that looks like the locked down app but isn't really, etc. Or students would sneak in a second phone.
You really don't want to give teenagers the temptation to sneak online or into their notes during exams.
>I love how the answer given to this problem is more funding. Such an indication of what's wrong with modern education.
The "answer given" was just a quote from a teacher about the millions of different ways education is underfunded, and not really about the calculator issue specifically.
Yes, the calculator problem could be solved in a wide variety of methods. Kids needing their own calculators is just one example of how underfunded schools are.
>
I love how the answer given to this problem is more funding. Such an indication of what's wrong with modern education. This entire article is exposing the TI monopoly on calculators, getting 85-90% profit margins, and our solution is to strike to get taxpayer money to keep paying for the things? We should encourage competition.
I love how the first answer that HN proposes to a social problem is 'more capitalism'.
Why not... Just not use graphing calculators in high schools? What's wrong with pencil and graph paper? Not a single one of my algebra or calculus courses ever used the TI-83 for anything that I couldn't do by hand, or with an $8 calculator.
There is zero reason for why high school test questions should ever require a smartphone, app, calculator, or any other electronic device.
And to prevent accidentally closing the app you tell the kids to activate “Kiosk mode” for the app, then they have to excuse if the close it. Works on both Android and iPhone.
Tangential story: When I was in middle school, we had a computers class where we had a mock stock-buying competition. Each team of 4 students was given a pretend 10,000 dollars to invest in the market, and then we could buy/sell throughout the semester and whoever was left with the most equity would win.
We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company...
...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.
My elementary school had a similar thing in (I believe) a math class I was in. I recall that we were given newspapers with a list of stock prices and were in groups. I can't recall if we were given any lesson on how the stock market worked. We had fairly little time to pick stocks. I'm not sure that I learned anything other than to actually know what you're doing if you're going to invest in random stocks.
As far as I can tell the TI graphing calculators are riding entirely off of mind share/familiarity, both among students and teachers, and teaching materials, which reinforces the former. Specifically textbooks and teacher training all use TI graphing calculators. Presumably tests are therefore made with the capabilities of a TI graphing calculator in mind.
TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi. Indeed an open source third party emulator already exists (https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu). Does anyone know what the legality of selling a calculator that is a dedicated emulator of a TI graphing calculator (not just an online one like Desmos, but a purpose-made physical calculator that does nothing else)? I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.
EDIT: I mean a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else but be a graphing calculator, e.g. not something on a smartphone.
That list is a bit misleading because the vast majority of those calculators are no longer manufactured. So, you could pick one up on ebay/etc and use it, but the problem is that if it breaks or gets lost it may be difficult to source another one. Given that the user interfaces/functionality is different from model to model its not necessarily easy to go from a TI 85 to a TI 84.
Which using that as an example, I still have my TI 85 my poor/single mother purchased in '92, but I ended up purchasing a TI 84 (ebay) for my middle school daughter this year because that is the calculator she knows how to use because they have them in school. Sure, I could have gotten one of the recent casio's, which is probably a better calculator than the '84, but its the same problem. The teacher shows them how to do stuff on the calculator, and the school's calculator's act as backup if she forgets/etc to bring it to class.
That said, while they are a rip-off, I used the same TI 85 for 8+ years of schooling. Back then that calculator was banned by the college board AFAIK, for testing because it had linear algebra solvers/etc. (apparently its now allowed along with the 89, which makes no sense) Even so, while I was probably the most honest student in many of my college classes there were many times when that calculator had a built in function which would directly solve problems I found on exams. For a few years I had an ongoing joke that engineering school was just 4 years of learning how to use all the built in functionality of my calculator.
HP used to make their own custom CPUs for their calculators, with an architecture designed for BCD arithmetic using 56-bit and later 64-bit registers. In 2003 they switched their graphing calculators to ARM9 processors running an emulator of their old CPU architecture so that they didn't need to re-write the whole OS.
SwissMicros did something similar for HP's non-graphing calculators, recreating the keyboard layouts but using modern ARM processors that run emulators of the original HP calculators. Apparently HP's early calculators did not include copyright notices for their OS: https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/microcode_copyright_status/
I have two high school age sons. They attend the same school. I bought graphing calculators for both. One told me Casio was ok. The other said the school requires TI. Go figure..
Software emulations on smart phone are not permitted due to school rules about mobile device use in class. Also they aren't allowed for tests due to the potential for cheating. Of course you can cheat by storing extra info in a graphing calculator but they don't seem to have thought of that..
I ran an emulator on my phone but I was not allowed to use it during tests. I had to write complex programs on the TI to solve the math problems on tests(I wanted to be a programmer not a math wiz). I once had a teacher who made you show him that you deleted all the programs, well there was a program for that. :)
Regardless of hardware capabilities, I remember the TI-89 capable of solving some computer algebra problems that I couldn't get even Mathematica at the time to solve.
TI calculators definitely do seem like dinosaurs in many ways, but the TI-89's CAS was seriously impressive even when disregarding the pitiful hardware it was running on.
> TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi.
IIRC, most ran on Z80s except the 89 and 92 which used 68000s.
That's an awesome Eagle Scout project. Addresses a real community need, leverages volunteer people-power, scales well, low risk. What an excellent choice.
That can be readily-combined with fundraising canvassing, too. The Girl Scouts could pick that up with a drop-box at every cookie table...
I can never be too mad at TI for this, since I'm only a programmer today because of a Ti-83+ and TI-BASIC
Or at least that's what I thought about I got to the part about the guilt the author felt over the purchase, and the teacher trying to buy them out of pocket. It really is despicable that we require 100$+ purchase every student's education when there are so many realistic cheaper alternatives
The build server has been dead for years, so you'll have to compile it yourself. If anyone's TI calculator is gathering dust in your closet, you might find this to be a fun hack to play with :)
From my experience, calculators in classrooms have had a few interesting and odd effects on intuition and expectation. For years, classes were separated and had "theoretical" components without calculator use and "computational" components with calculator use. The computational parts would involve gross numbers with real-ish answers --- things don't work out so nicely. But the theory parts would always have very nice answers (if some sort of computation had to be done).
It turns out that I came to expect theoretical aspects to always work out nicely; similarly, I often failed to see the light through the hairy parts of the computational parts.
This came to the fore when I took an Ordinary Differential Equations / Calculus of Variations course. There were no calculators now --- when we needed computational power, we used various CAS. I remember being very confused the first time we showed a solution existed to some ODE, and then "found it" to any degree of precision we wanted. This was partly theory, but it was very imperfect! My mathematical intuition ended up sharpening strongly during that semester.
Now I'm a number theorist. When I teach, I don't use calculators. I'm acutely aware, however, that early elementary number theory ends up being presented as a delightful and pure little topic. I think there is some need for continued computational aspects in math courses, but I haven't quite seen it done just right yet. (When I do incorporate computational aspects, it's either attached to a basic programming course or attached to an introductory sagemath CAS course).
The computation of early (primary school) math courses could be done with a counting board, which is a type of general-purpose computer with memory consisting of buttons/coins and a human for a CPU.
Later (high school / undergraduate coursework), it would be good to use a programming language like Python or Julia or Swift ....
I also think students should spend at least a few weeks or months using a slide rule and printed tables for basic arithmetic, but more to learn about logarithms and mathematical history than to learn about computational mathematics per se.
I am always surprised in hearing that American students need a programmable, graphing calculator. In most of Asia such is not required, only a much cheaper 'scientfic' calculator, even for graduate courses in science and engineering.
Some disciplines even in sciences/engineering, for example Computer Science, does not require any sort of calculator usually.
By ‘eck, when I were a lad we drew cumulative frequency curves and histograms by hand, and looked up statistical values in the back of a common formulae book.
When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator.
TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous.
You don't need a graphic calculator for high school. Hundreds of millions of kids in China and India graduate without one and do just fine. Differential calculus is now 400+ years old and generations of humans have done fine without a graphing calculator.
I saw a youtube interviewing the guy that wrote the code for the HP-35. He said that David Packard got mad when he heard that every engineer in a certain division of HP was going to get their own HP-35. He said that one calculator could easily be shared among 4 or 5 people.
As someone who has just got out of the curriculum that enforces usage of the TI calculators, given the ubiquity of these devices, I wish it was used more in teaching students about low-level programming, hardware, etc. especially with older models such as the TI-84+ there's great hacking potential. Compared to programming on the modern software stack, the Z80 is minimal. Plus, who said it has to be in assembly? Forth would do!
They didn't in New Zealand; Casio did. Then students come to university and stop using them much - too limited and primitive compared to computers and smartphones, too powerful for the courses where we're trying to teach and assess analytical maths skills.
I doubt it does. Most of Asia you'd find Casio is the preferred brand, and TI, HP isn't even available.
The Casio ones should be cheaper in the US too(they usually cost around 10$), I would think them very popular there as well, unless perhaps TI and HP has some kind of nerfarious link up with the Dept of Education to monopolize the market.
Not related to the monopoly stuff but I like HP calculators best! For college I used an HP 35S—it’s a programmable scientific calculator and fun to program because it uses RPN stacks for calculations and storing results.
Why have no edtechs created a low cost version of the TI-83/84? One that mirrors the functionality of the TI calcs so that they can still be used with textbooks that are dependent on those. The article estimates the TI's cost $15-20 to make, but even that seems very high for what they are.
I imagine the harder part is getting approval from the organizations that administer standardized tests like College Board and the states themselves.
In highschool, I had a TI-83, and had fun doing things like programming blackjack on it, so I could look like I was doing work while having fun. I went to an engineering school and switched to an HP-48GX for my years at it, and fell in love with the RPN input. I miss that calculator, but not the TI.
I think I sold the HP 8 years after I bought it for $20 more than I bought it for. They were discontinued, and surveyors and others that had special modules that could plug into it would pay a premium for a replacement one.
[+] [-] julienb_sea|6 years ago|reply
Consider - an app that replicates this functionality on the phone, but tracks if the user at any point closes the app. This then is reported to the teacher so the teacher knows if there was any cheating.
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
The used market must be absolutely massive, larger than any other piece of consumer electronics. No wonder TI can't budge from their pricing. These things also do not break. I've left mine out in a blizzard. You throw them at a wall and you will find your ti84 sitting happily embedded in a crater in the drywall.
[+] [-] seabass|6 years ago|reply
t. Student who’s had to deal with lockdown browser and similar school-specific proprietary malware.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
how about: a standardized test calculator specification, with careful boundaries around what is required, what is permitted and what is not.
Then let competition drive prices and features.
[+] [-] mc3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smelendez|6 years ago|reply
Bring your own device sounds like a mess. Someone would create an app that looks like the locked down app but isn't really, etc. Or students would sneak in a second phone.
You really don't want to give teenagers the temptation to sneak online or into their notes during exams.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|6 years ago|reply
The "answer given" was just a quote from a teacher about the millions of different ways education is underfunded, and not really about the calculator issue specifically.
Yes, the calculator problem could be solved in a wide variety of methods. Kids needing their own calculators is just one example of how underfunded schools are.
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
I love how the first answer that HN proposes to a social problem is 'more capitalism'.
Why not... Just not use graphing calculators in high schools? What's wrong with pencil and graph paper? Not a single one of my algebra or calculus courses ever used the TI-83 for anything that I couldn't do by hand, or with an $8 calculator.
There is zero reason for why high school test questions should ever require a smartphone, app, calculator, or any other electronic device.
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.
[+] [-] punnerud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|6 years ago|reply
Apple Classroom does this.
[+] [-] enjoyyourlife|6 years ago|reply
ClassCalc already does this
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company...
...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.
[+] [-] btrettel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwohnitmok|6 years ago|reply
CollegeBoard actually has a wide range of calculators it allows for the SAT (https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...), but very few test takers take advantage of this.
TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi. Indeed an open source third party emulator already exists (https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu). Does anyone know what the legality of selling a calculator that is a dedicated emulator of a TI graphing calculator (not just an online one like Desmos, but a purpose-made physical calculator that does nothing else)? I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.
EDIT: I mean a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else but be a graphing calculator, e.g. not something on a smartphone.
[+] [-] StillBored|6 years ago|reply
Which using that as an example, I still have my TI 85 my poor/single mother purchased in '92, but I ended up purchasing a TI 84 (ebay) for my middle school daughter this year because that is the calculator she knows how to use because they have them in school. Sure, I could have gotten one of the recent casio's, which is probably a better calculator than the '84, but its the same problem. The teacher shows them how to do stuff on the calculator, and the school's calculator's act as backup if she forgets/etc to bring it to class.
That said, while they are a rip-off, I used the same TI 85 for 8+ years of schooling. Back then that calculator was banned by the college board AFAIK, for testing because it had linear algebra solvers/etc. (apparently its now allowed along with the 89, which makes no sense) Even so, while I was probably the most honest student in many of my college classes there were many times when that calculator had a built in function which would directly solve problems I found on exams. For a few years I had an ongoing joke that engineering school was just 4 years of learning how to use all the built in functionality of my calculator.
[+] [-] wtallis|6 years ago|reply
SwissMicros did something similar for HP's non-graphing calculators, recreating the keyboard layouts but using modern ARM processors that run emulators of the original HP calculators. Apparently HP's early calculators did not include copyright notices for their OS: https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/microcode_copyright_status/
[+] [-] dboreham|6 years ago|reply
Software emulations on smart phone are not permitted due to school rules about mobile device use in class. Also they aren't allowed for tests due to the potential for cheating. Of course you can cheat by storing extra info in a graphing calculator but they don't seem to have thought of that..
[+] [-] avgDev|6 years ago|reply
I don't recommend using aides during tests.
[+] [-] creato|6 years ago|reply
TI calculators definitely do seem like dinosaurs in many ways, but the TI-89's CAS was seriously impressive even when disregarding the pitiful hardware it was running on.
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
[+] [-] mdszy|6 years ago|reply
Probably for exactly the reason you're asking about: legality. There's no way that the licenses of the TI calculator software allow for this.
[+] [-] CharlesColeman|6 years ago|reply
IIRC, most ran on Z80s except the 89 and 92 which used 68000s.
[+] [-] sanj|6 years ago|reply
If you have any kicking around, drop me email and I can fwd to him.
[+] [-] ISL|6 years ago|reply
That can be readily-combined with fundraising canvassing, too. The Girl Scouts could pick that up with a drop-box at every cookie table...
[+] [-] BoorishBears|6 years ago|reply
Or at least that's what I thought about I got to the part about the guilt the author felt over the purchase, and the teacher trying to buy them out of pocket. It really is despicable that we require 100$+ purchase every student's education when there are so many realistic cheaper alternatives
[+] [-] ddevault|6 years ago|reply
https://knightos.org
The build server has been dead for years, so you'll have to compile it yourself. If anyone's TI calculator is gathering dust in your closet, you might find this to be a fun hack to play with :)
[+] [-] mixedmath|6 years ago|reply
It turns out that I came to expect theoretical aspects to always work out nicely; similarly, I often failed to see the light through the hairy parts of the computational parts.
This came to the fore when I took an Ordinary Differential Equations / Calculus of Variations course. There were no calculators now --- when we needed computational power, we used various CAS. I remember being very confused the first time we showed a solution existed to some ODE, and then "found it" to any degree of precision we wanted. This was partly theory, but it was very imperfect! My mathematical intuition ended up sharpening strongly during that semester.
Now I'm a number theorist. When I teach, I don't use calculators. I'm acutely aware, however, that early elementary number theory ends up being presented as a delightful and pure little topic. I think there is some need for continued computational aspects in math courses, but I haven't quite seen it done just right yet. (When I do incorporate computational aspects, it's either attached to a basic programming course or attached to an introductory sagemath CAS course).
[+] [-] jacobolus|6 years ago|reply
Later (high school / undergraduate coursework), it would be good to use a programming language like Python or Julia or Swift ....
I also think students should spend at least a few weeks or months using a slide rule and printed tables for basic arithmetic, but more to learn about logarithms and mathematical history than to learn about computational mathematics per se.
[+] [-] billfruit|6 years ago|reply
Some disciplines even in sciences/engineering, for example Computer Science, does not require any sort of calculator usually.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|6 years ago|reply
When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator.
TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous.
— Sent from my iPhone XS
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
I have tried to explain it to my wife, but she can't grok it. I'm going to have to buy one from fleaBay to get her to understand.
[+] [-] shriphani|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhallenworld|6 years ago|reply
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
[+] [-] jtlienwis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siraben|6 years ago|reply
Some of my own hacking attempts:
[1] https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80/
[2] https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth/
[+] [-] tropo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billfruit|6 years ago|reply
The Casio ones should be cheaper in the US too(they usually cost around 10$), I would think them very popular there as well, unless perhaps TI and HP has some kind of nerfarious link up with the Dept of Education to monopolize the market.
[+] [-] bjornjaja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfrangakis|6 years ago|reply
I imagine the harder part is getting approval from the organizations that administer standardized tests like College Board and the states themselves.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briffle|6 years ago|reply
I think I sold the HP 8 years after I bought it for $20 more than I bought it for. They were discontinued, and surveyors and others that had special modules that could plug into it would pay a premium for a replacement one.
[+] [-] samgranieri|6 years ago|reply
However, that was in the mid 90s.
It's shocking those calculators are still around and cost that much.