zlacker

>>lewisf+(OP)
Has math education actually improved with the introduction of calculators? Easy and equitable solution would be to remove them from classes and tests.

>>WillPo+li
Has introducing students to a programmable computer dedicated to math improved math education? Yes, yes it has. Writing a program to automate certain computations certainly helps your understanding better than performing said computations by rote multiple times.

>>knolax+Uo
How does it do that? It seems like graphing equations by hand on graph paper would help understanding better. And my personal experience tells me that rote practice increases task fluency. Do you have any citations to back up your claim?

>>tricer+Dt
Do you have any to back up your claims? Everyone here (myself included) is just arguing by anecdote.

>>knolax+OE
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that practice improves fluency in all kinds of tasks. Since we're talking about mathematics, here's a relevant paper.[1] Mind I'm not an expert on the literature in this subject and I searched for about 2 minutes.

But "practice makes perfect" isn't that radical of an idea - you'd be hard-pressed to find a task at which someone doesn't get better with practice (barring biologically impossible ones).

EDIT: you mentioned "writing a program to automate computations" and yes I agree that that would certainly help understanding. I've not used graphing calculators all that much though, so I thought they were mostly used for plotting graphs and calculating statistical measures such as mean, standard deviation, percentiles etc. And I don't see much need for program-writing on the part of the student to do all that. The student might be far better off writing simple Python or JS programs to do those things.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10649-017-9788-x