zlacker

>>lewisf+(OP)
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.

>>julien+t21
Here's an idea: Stop trying force the backwards notion that using tools is cheating. There is 0 reason that any high-stakes test needs a calculator.

This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.

>>gowld+i81
I understand that there are virtually no tests that _actually_ need a TI calculator.

They're mad useful for learning - you can explore maths very effectively, but there's a learning curve to it.

I started using GraphNCalc83 on my iPhone (maybe available on Android - I'm sure an alternative is if not), and I question the real need for a £120 calculator.

>>ddek+5c1
The only test I ever took which needed a TI calculator was the AP calculus exam. I borrowed one from the school, and it was a bit of a pain to figure out the UI during the test, but overall it went fine.

The calculators are a completely counter-productive and distracting tool for “learning” which have contributed to a watered down curriculum with more mindless button punching and less thinking than before. Anecdotally some students never recover from the mistaken idea that math class is about learning how calculators work.

There is no reason to assign problems which require a calculator in high school mathematics courses, and for anything that would benefit, there’s a huge advantage in using a computer with a full-sized keyboard and a general-purpose programming language, or even a smartphone with a web browser. Do your basic plotting at the free desmos.com, with the added bonus that sharing plots with classmates is trivial because you can generate a URL.