Or at least that's what I thought about I got to the part about the guilt the author felt over the purchase, and the teacher trying to buy them out of pocket. It really is despicable that we require 100$+ purchase every student's education when there are so many realistic cheaper alternatives
This could be solved with a simple sellback program.
1. Purchase from school for $100
2. Sell back for $95
3. Repeat forever until calculator breaks
The build server has been dead for years, so you'll have to compile it yourself. If anyone's TI calculator is gathering dust in your closet, you might find this to be a fun hack to play with :)
I imagine the harder part is getting approval from the organizations that administer standardized tests like College Board and the states themselves.
Calculators used in university entrance examinations must be approved and certified by THE COLLEGE BOARD™, who will only approve specific models and not workalikes. The stated reason for this is to prevent cheating, but as usual the creation of monopolies who can then charge what they like is a nice side benefit, if not the primary benefit.
But there's concerted effort to keep the perceived value of used calculators from being too high from TI and their partners.
Things like peripherals that only work with new devices for lab work, to textbook examples that rely on color (which only newer ones have).
As soon as you go up a couple of levels in age you see the prices start to spike: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ti+nspire+cx
I say perceived value, because in reality the Ti-83 would still work for 99% of use cases, but TI has it's finger in the education pie, so it's easy for them to get textbooks to say things like "TI Nspire CX recommended" or have images and button presses that will only match their newest calculators
Unfortunately, the modern "HP" calculators are not as well made or have as good a keyboard feel.
(I actually didn't have a calculator until college.)
I think I sold the HP 8 years after I bought it for $20 more than I bought it for. They were discontinued, and surveyors and others that had special modules that could plug into it would pay a premium for a replacement one.
My kids are in high school now and it seems like what the tests are really measuring is the ability for the kids to take a test. The SAT feels especially useless as an indicator of anything other than that.
While the TI-83 and 86 had a pedestrian Z80, the HP series apparently had a weird nybble-serial architecture called Saturn that worked on 64-bit values.
The Casio ones should be cheaper in the US too(they usually cost around 10$), I would think them very popular there as well, unless perhaps TI and HP has some kind of nerfarious link up with the Dept of Education to monopolize the market.
However, that was in the mid 90s.
It's shocking those calculators are still around and cost that much.
The general rule was scientific calculator only.
But on the other, there are a newer entries on the list that seem totally unrelated to the incumbents like Casio and HP, like this one:
It makes me wonder what the actual certification process looks like, maybe it's just adding things like exam mode and presenting it to the board
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848639456.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
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.
If you have any kicking around, drop me email and I can fwd to him.
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.
[1] https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/
Some disciplines even in sciences/engineering, for example Computer Science, does not require any sort of calculator usually.
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
(And, ideally, the ability to play them on the computer.)
That can be readily-combined with fundraising canvassing, too. The Girl Scouts could pick that up with a drop-box at every cookie table...
When those tasks would have slowed class down — the teacher might not have wanted us to spend time drawing a curve when the real lesson was interpreting it — our teachers did it for us and put it on the class TV. Calculating statistical values was also done quickly with a $17 Casio engineering calculator.
TI-83s existed, but there was a culture in my school (ironically, a private one) that graphing calculators were a status-signaling more-money-than-sense thing. Too bad that such a culture isn’t ubiquitous.
— Sent from my iPhone XS
Software emulations on smart phone are not permitted due to school rules about mobile device use in class. Also they aren't allowed for tests due to the potential for cheating. Of course you can cheat by storing extra info in a graphing calculator but they don't seem to have thought of that..
A company providing this would still need to get it certified etc to get schools on board presumably.
I have tried to explain it to my wife, but she can't grok it. I'm going to have to buy one from fleaBay to get her to understand.
Could you sell a calculator, and say "hey this calculator has no software on it, but you can dump your TI ROM onto it and it'll run" kinda like how emulator software is handled on computers? Probably.
Can you just straight up rip the ROM and start selling that on an emulated calculator? Almost certainly not.
I don't recommend using aides during tests.
It turns out that I came to expect theoretical aspects to always work out nicely; similarly, I often failed to see the light through the hairy parts of the computational parts.
This came to the fore when I took an Ordinary Differential Equations / Calculus of Variations course. There were no calculators now --- when we needed computational power, we used various CAS. I remember being very confused the first time we showed a solution existed to some ODE, and then "found it" to any degree of precision we wanted. This was partly theory, but it was very imperfect! My mathematical intuition ended up sharpening strongly during that semester.
Now I'm a number theorist. When I teach, I don't use calculators. I'm acutely aware, however, that early elementary number theory ends up being presented as a delightful and pure little topic. I think there is some need for continued computational aspects in math courses, but I haven't quite seen it done just right yet. (When I do incorporate computational aspects, it's either attached to a basic programming course or attached to an introductory sagemath CAS course).
Although it'd be interesting if the calculator had a one-time flashing capability that allowed you to load an emulator once and then make it immutable and there was a way for schools to inspect what was loaded.
Some of my own hacking attempts:
However, this was partially addressed in the article. Phones (if students have them) have apps which make solving the math problems too easy, scan the problem and the steps and solution are displayed. So teachers can't permit them in the classroom if they eliminate the learning objective entirely.
With regard to computers, though, Desmos [0] was spoken of in the article. They have apps for computers and phones, and they've made some headway with making the computer program available when students have mandatory tests that are already on computers.
I don't think your judgement really makes sense, the education system is adapting. But it's a long process and the problem still remains, if educational materials and curricula require the use of technology, and the teachers and students can't afford it, then it's still a failure or sets up classes of people to fail due to lack of economic viability.
When I got to college I retook the remedial math courses (starting with the equivelent of Algebra II) before I could take calculus (and the other math courses for a CS degree).
Not a single professor of a math course let us use a graphing calculator, and infact, most had a "no calculator" policy.
I never really put that together: you can learn the same curriculum with or without a calculator.
IMO this gives a much better inherent understanding of equations, rather than just plugging in some numbers into a calculator and reading what comes out.
I still fail to understand why the hell graphing calculators are required for some high school math curriculum.
IIRC, most ran on Z80s except the 89 and 92 which used 68000s.
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.
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.
I think some can also do calculus, which is something where you can often miss a term or forget a minus, so definitely useful for checking that kind of thing.
I happen to be a physicist too and while I’m not an experimentalist, I’ve been through plenty of experimental training, and have participated in real world data analysis projects. Never once have I seen any physicist doing any statistics with a graphing calculator (I did see a few when I taught undergrads mostly from other departments, so there’s that).
I think my TI (yeah I did have one as the prize of some math competition...) could do some integration too but I never used it.
The thing is these crappy calculators do a poor job of pretty much everything they claim to do. Some of the functionality might help with learning, sure, but you’d better use an actual computer (including a modern smartphone). It’s not 1980s anymore...
There are online virtual slide rules like http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n909es/virtual-n909-e...
The key concept is understanding how logarithms work.
Even the non CAS models can solve a lot of programs numerically which in my mind creates a lot of confusion about what people gain with simple programs.
Particularly as even without a built in root/etc finder, things like newton's method (or any numerical/recursive algo) can be used on the main calculation screen by using the previous result variable in equations and holding down the enter/repeat key until it converges or you get enough precision.
Most of them also have a constants list that includes pretty much every constant your going to use in science/engineering/etc school.
So I remember seeing some of my classmates programs for various classes and calculators (HP 84s/various other TIs), and I never remember wanting any of them because I knew how to solve the exact same problem with the built in functionality on my TI-85.
At the end of the day, if you want to remove the calculator from the statistics classroom you probably also have to remove the standardized test.
We never had restrictions, HP, Casio, TI, just bring your favourite one into the class.
In my experience that's where all the time saved by automating rote calculation went. Maybe this is a generational thing but for a lot of my peers Ti-84s were their first experience with programming. It's probably the only context where most students are exposed to computing that doesn't involve always connected data-harvesting.
> going to the computer lab
A student has no incentive to write programs if they aren't actually going to use them.
> Are those rare instances worth every student having such an expensive thing for several years?
I remember buying mine at a flea market for literally a quarter. TI-84s have been around for so long that they're really only expensive if you're hellbent on only buying new. Every garage sale and Goodwill in the country has at least one of these for cheap.
[1] I have an electrical engineering degree from a US public university.
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
edit: or at least, it used to. Haven't tested in years.
I still find using a touch screen much more frustrating than a calculator with physical buttons, but this is a legit alternative.
[1] https://acornaircraft.com/graphncalc83.html
[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/classroom/manage-app-usage-a...
SwissMicros did something similar for HP's non-graphing calculators, recreating the keyboard layouts but using modern ARM processors that run emulators of the original HP calculators. Apparently HP's early calculators did not include copyright notices for their OS: https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/microcode_copyright_status/
When I was in HS, my teachers became wise to the existence of apps that would display the mem cleared message, so they would go around to each student and clear the memory themselves. This annoyed me as I'd written a lot of useful to me utilities (not cheats) and games, so I wrote a not-so-little program that emulated all of the system menus. You have to enter a hidden key combo to get out of it.
Looking back at it, the code embarrasses me because it is so goddamn awful. I didn't know how to write functions or use the stack properly. It was just one giant mess of jumps and conditional branches. But hey, it worked.
Sadly, I think all of my Z80 assembly is lost. I don't think I shared it on any sites, either.
Why the hell does a math class need a calculator?
And if you need a calculator, just allow a smartphone instead.
Its a strange class indeed that forbids phones but allows calculators. What a precise way to thread requirements precisely to require more useless equipment.
American schools are so annoying.
We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company...
...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.
I am not so completely old and my textbooks didn't take any particular model of calculator into account. Especially all the university math classes where it started to matter.
Well, you need one if the instructor makes it a requirement, which my kid's high school does. They're actually tested on linear regression, but they don't know how to compute sum of least squares: they know how to type a list into their calculator and run the least squares function. It's on the exam, and if they don't have the TI graphing calculator with that exact function programmed into it, they fail the test.
And yes, drawing the graph by yourself is for sure the way better way to learn something. But what do we know ...
Or, you know, not. It's a settled thing, and has been for a long time.
I'm too old to have been part of the TI cohort, but I had one of the early graphing calculators in high school (1987 or so), from Casio, and let me tell you having the ability to quickly graph a function is actually SUPER USEFUL, especially in an experimental/learning environment.
So maybe stop whining that "millions of kids" elsewhere or in the past didn't have one, because it's completely irrelevant.
When I entered the workforce and met engineers much older (say, born 10+ years before I was in 1970), they'd often have one in a desk drawer, but they weren't using them either.
TI calculators definitely do seem like dinosaurs in many ways, but the TI-89's CAS was seriously impressive even when disregarding the pitiful hardware it was running on.
It's possible that it's different now. When I was in high school, using graphing calculators was a new trend, and a lot of the teachers resented having to teach something they didn't learn in school.
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.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/FX-991EX-Advanced-Scientific-Calcul... (£20)
Pretty sure most of my physics degree class used an FX-83.
There used be a Monopoly clone, but that's gone. Allegedly the trademark owner (Parker Brothers at the time IIRC) went after the developer for trademark infringement and he had to take it down. But, rather than sue them, PB actually hired the dev to make the original Game Boy Monopoly game. No idea about the veracity of this, but just a vague recollection from the 90s.
I actually still have my dead-tree Z80 instruct set reference manual sitting on my shelf at home next to my 68K manual. 2 of my oldest and well used programming references.
It does have the two most recent HP calculators listed, though. That's makes me pretty happy.
He received a standing ovation.
Don't you just love geeks?
I'd been using RPN since high school.
In college (late 70s) I still took a slide rule to exams as a backup; LED calculators could run out of juice. But I never used it.
It does cost more to mark those tests than pure multiple choice though.
This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.
I had a graphing calculator to check my calculus homework. (This was pre smartphone)
I'd LOVE for your kid's 0 test score to go viral on social media and get kilobucks of revenue from the 15 minutes of fame to pay for college.
For calculus, that's not so good. To have any intuition about calculus you need to be really proficient at algebra and graphing--by hand.
When you apply calculus in engineering and physics, sure, use the calculator. But when it's just calc, it really needs to be structured to be able to be done by hand.
I love teachers, family is full of them, and maybe they shouldn't allow themselves to be used so ruthlessly by the state?
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.
my first HP, a 15c, stays home, safe & sound, with it's original spine-bound manual. I think I've replaced the batteries three times in some thirty-five years.
also have a 32sII that I bought off a friend who'd gotten it as a gift for his gf who was starting some math/sci class … but "she didn't like it" (which I read as, "wth is RPN". her loss!)
how about: a standardized test calculator specification, with careful boundaries around what is required, what is permitted and what is not.
Then let competition drive prices and features.
I feel the same way. I typically use "dc" for all my calculation needs. I recently needed to do some calculations on my phone and was very confused that it "knows" the order of operations. I already knew what order I wanted the operations performed in, thankyouverymuch.
2 + 3 * 9 = 29 but 2 3 + 9 * p = 45, for example. Apparently you have to press = every time you want to use the sub-result in the next calculation. It is very confusing.
I am not sure why we even have infix operators in mathematics to begin with. It just causes problems.
ClassCalc already does this
There are a number of scientific calculators that actually do a pretty good job at this, and they’re dirt cheap to boot.
The used market must be absolutely massive, larger than any other piece of consumer electronics. No wonder TI can't budge from their pricing. These things also do not break. I've left mine out in a blizzard. You throw them at a wall and you will find your ti84 sitting happily embedded in a crater in the drywall.
Apple Classroom does this.
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.
Better still would be to eliminate the need for a TI calculator from the AP exam, and then there would be no need for it whatsoever.
Later (high school / undergraduate coursework), it would be good to use a programming language like Python or Julia or Swift ....
I also think students should spend at least a few weeks or months using a slide rule and printed tables for basic arithmetic, but more to learn about logarithms and mathematical history than to learn about computational mathematics per se.
As a pedagogical tool it is much superior. People who spend a few months using a slide rule come to a strong intuitive understanding of logarithms that no number of purely symbolic exercises with logs can ever match. Slide rules are also quite efficient tools for doing approximate calculations, much faster than pen and paper.
For anything too sophisticated for a slide rule to handle, students should use a general-purpose programming language and a full-sized keyboard.
t. Student who’s had to deal with lockdown browser and similar school-specific proprietary malware.
Bring your own device sounds like a mess. Someone would create an app that looks like the locked down app but isn't really, etc. Or students would sneak in a second phone.
You really don't want to give teenagers the temptation to sneak online or into their notes during exams.
I love how the first answer that HN proposes to a social problem is 'more capitalism'.
Why not... Just not use graphing calculators in high schools? What's wrong with pencil and graph paper? Not a single one of my algebra or calculus courses ever used the TI-83 for anything that I couldn't do by hand, or with an $8 calculator.
There is zero reason for why high school test questions should ever require a smartphone, app, calculator, or any other electronic device.
Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. When it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint, trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped back, squinted, then added a little curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the forehead to be, a few pale orange polkadots. Extremely pleased with himself, he whistled an air and, as is always done on such occasions, asked it the ritual question of how much is two plus two.
The machine stirred. Its tubes began to glow, its coils warmed up, current coursed through all its circuits like a waterfall, transformers hummed and throbbed, there was a clanging, and a chugging, and such an ungodly racket that Trurl began to think of adding a special mentation muffler. Meanwhile the machine labored on, as if it had been given the most difficult problem in the Universe to solve; the ground shook, the sand slid underfoot from the vibration, valves popped like champagne corks, the relays nearly gave way under the strain. At last, when Trurl had grown extremely impatient, the machine ground to a halt and said in a voice like thunder: SEVEN!
[...]
https://books.google.nl/books?id=xhbFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&lpg=PT...
And in-car driving instruction happens with the teacher next to the student in a car they're familiar with. It's not like they're radioing to 30 students each in a separate car.
Also, the calculator is a tool to teach math. If someone gets distracted figuring out the calculator, they're behind. The student driver car is to teach driving.
What math class requires a calculator?
I still remember struggling with my Differential Equations class (got a D on the midterm), and my father said "Why is it so hard? You were always so great at arithmetic, just use a calculator!"
At the time, a simple graphing calculator was high end (and out of my price range), nowadays I probably could do most of that homework with an equation solving smart app)
The "answer given" was just a quote from a teacher about the millions of different ways education is underfunded, and not really about the calculator issue specifically.
Yes, the calculator problem could be solved in a wide variety of methods. Kids needing their own calculators is just one example of how underfunded schools are.
More capitalism (or better to say market) is always good answer because it helps to solve situations where people are stuck with inefficient and useless products. If children and parents could choose between schools with different programs, and teaching apps, this expensive and outdated calculator would not exist now.
Scientists don't use apps on computers or smartphones.
Scientists use Jupyter and Matlab. For high school courses, you could even get away with something like Excel or Sheets, or LibreCalc.
> More capitalism (or better to say market) is always good answer because it helps to solve situations where people are stuck with inefficient and useless products.
The best product in this case, is no product.
> If children and parents could choose between schools with different programs, and teaching apps, this expensive and outdated calculator would not exist now.
This is the last thing on people's minds when choosing schools.
> The best product in this case, is no product.
Pen and paper is a product too, which eventually will be replaced by tablet and stylus eventually.
> This is the last thing on people's minds when choosing schools.
Deciding something is unimportant, is a valid choice too, and in that case market helps to not waste resources on unimportant things, and focus on important things instead.
But then it's not required for this to be a top priority for all parents, the decision of parents who are specifically interested in mathematics would be enough to create the right incentives for the market to solve the issue.
Games: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Jeux+z80
A lot of emulators there: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_list.php?cat=Utilitaires...
One of them is web-based: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=1414 (also hosted online at brandonmeyer.net/projects/TI8XEmu/TI8XEmu.html but I can't access it now)
Coming second as communities are Omnimaga, and ti-calc.org
I feel like the only redeeming quality of these calculators is the community around them; and they make kids interested into programming and electronics. The landscape is looking better and better for who wants to hack his calculator.
Of course, the most convenient emulator is offered by numworks for their calculator: it's right there, on their website: https://www.numworks.com/simulator/
I use xcas when I need CAS, but the interface is a bit unwieldy.
Not letting the state treat them that way would require looking at how their colleagues up north manage to get tenure and long-term contracts. But that would involve being in a true union.
And the "problem" that teachers would not know how your particular brand works sounds weird. There are so many ways to figure this out. I mean the student can read the manual. Or ask for help from fellow students.
And our standardized secondary school graduation exam defines what you can do with calculators:
> On solving the problems, you may use a calculator that cannot store and display textual information. You may also use any edition of the four-digit data tables. The use of any other electronic device or printed or written material is forbidden!
> The use of calculators in the reasoning behind a particular solution may be accepted without further mathematical explanation in case of the following operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, calculating powers and roots, n!, n-choose-k, replacing the tables found in the 4-digit Data Booklet (sin, cos, tan, log, and their inverse functions), approximate values of the numbers π and e, finding the solutions of the standard quadratic equation. No further explanation is needed when the calculator is used to find the mean and the standard deviation, as long as the text of the question does not explicitly require the candidate to show detailed work. In any other cases, results obtained through the use of a calculator are considered as unexplained and points for such results will not be awarded.
By the way these sheets are publicly available even in English, e.g. from Spring 2019:
Basic level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav... Advanced level: http://dload.oktatas.educatio.hu/erettsegi/feladatok_2019tav...
Graphing calculators are something you either are very enterprisey about, or something you start dealing with in university. My father's Casio FX series was good enough with its "record buttons" programming and basic graphing.
The few times we went above and beyond with tools, it involved playing around with Maxima in high school to ease up simplification and equation solving, but we had to be careful to not become dependant on it - after all, exams allowed a 4 function calculator only.
Honestly, there is a massive instructional benefit to being on a unified platform because it allows the cognitive load of the tool to get out of the way of the cognitive load of the work.
The problem is that TI has been pretty perfidious with their pricing and influence.
I hate to be that guy, but I think the only real solution would be to set up an open source foundation and create a unified standard for graphing calculator UI (including strictly defined key mapping/behavior) that would be applicable from Algebra up through Calc II. Then the market would be flooded with cheap chinese clones that can all run this firmware and cost like $15
I am honestly shocked that there are any operators that aren't Extra class.
Disclaimer: I'm originally from the UK and well versed in "old school" approaches :)
What comes to my mind - a great adoption of electronic dictionaries in Japan （電子辞書）. Many are Japanese who study English, find it more convenient.
Which is more than offset by the social cost of it being a monopolized proprietary platform. But since we have pretty good idea of what the requirements are for the common platform, it should be quite easy and, in the long term, a significant savings for a sufficiently large education body or coalition thereof to develop and maintain an open, unencumbered standard for meeting those requirements with a reasonable-cost certification program for those circumstances where certified-compliant implementations are important.