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[return to "Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class"]
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1. dwohni+Ic[view] [source] 2019-11-26 16:31:06
>>lewisf+(OP)
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.

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.

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2. mdszy+ed[view] [source] 2019-11-26 16:33:45
>>dwohni+Ic
> I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.

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.

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3. ghaff+he[view] [source] 2019-11-26 16:38:38
>>mdszy+ed
IANAL but it's unclear to me why that would be illegal. See Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. [ADDED: Basically said it was OK for Borland to sell a spreadsheet with the same look and feel as Lotus 1-2-3.] What probably is true is that the work-alike would likely not be certified to be used on exams unless some company spent the money to do so and then they're not really incentivized to sell the calculator for cheap.

The whole situation seems very path dependent. There's probably no particularly good reason why you even need a graphing calculator. It's just sort of become the default.

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