zlacker

>>lewisf+(OP)
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.

>>billfr+Od
It's a relatively recent development. I majored in physics, and made it through differential equations in the 1990s without one. It's a requirement for my daughter's high school math class.

>>harold+We
It does does raise the question. Why do American highschoolers need it, and why not them in the rest of the world. Why saddle students and parents with an additional 100$+ expense, when very possibly it isn't strictly pedagogically necessary.

>>billfr+Bh
For the most part "graphing calculator" seems to be a catch all term for "scientific calculator with the features we need" in that little actual graphing is done. But I have seen problems in my son's "Algebra 2" class that require plotting polynomials on the calculator then describing their roots, shape etc. As a way to build intuition about the geometric interpretation of functions, that seems like a reasonable approach although Wolfram alpha would do a decent job too.

>>dboreh+jm
Do you mean the problem gave him a formula and asked him to describe the graph? There's no educational value in using a calculator to generate that graph compared to the graph just being printed alongside the formula. You don't learn by being given the answers before you try to do it yourself. Instead, you need to come up with an answer yourself then check if it's right. The calculator could be useful for checking, but only if the student doesn't use it while they're doing it themselves, otherwise it's no better than copying answers out of the answer book.

The value I can imagine with generating graphs on a calculator would be trying a large number of graphs that are too numerous to print in the text book or to organize in some big table of graphs. That's also the value of a scientific calculator which is faster than looking up trig functions in tables, or a basic calculator that's faster than doing arithmetic by hand.