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 :)
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
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.
[1] https://www.casio-intl.com/asia/en/calc/products/fx-350MS/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
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.
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.
[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
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/
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.
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...
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/
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...