zlacker

>>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.

>>dwohni+Ic
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.