zlacker

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+(OP)
> I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.

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.

>>mdszy+w
IANAL but it's unclear to me why that would be illegal. See Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. [ADDED: Basically said it was OK for Borland to sell a spreadsheet with the same look and feel as Lotus 1-2-3.] What probably is true is that the work-alike would likely not be certified to be used on exams unless some company spent the money to do so and then they're not really incentivized to sell the calculator for cheap.

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.

>>dwohni+(OP)
I mean, a quick google search shows that there are Ti-83 emulator apps on the market:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...

>>dwohni+(OP)
I have two high school age sons. They attend the same school. I bought graphing calculators for both. One told me Casio was ok. The other said the school requires TI. Go figure..

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..

>>umvi+S2
Schools often don't allow their use (see comments above).

>>dboreh+88
This is what I meant by a dedicated emulator. That is the hardware is locked down to do absolutely nothing else except emulate a TI. The only reason to use an emulator is to save on dev work.

A company providing this would still need to get it certified etc to get schools on board presumably.

>>umvi+S2
This isn't enough because it's not a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else. I would guess you need the inability for the hardware platform to do nothing else except be an emulator for schools to even begin to trust it.

>>ghaff+z1
The parent comment isn't about "same look and feel", they're talking about literally dumping the ROM from the TI calculator and running it on other hardware.

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.

>>dboreh+88
I remember my math teacher used to come around and take everyone’s batteries out at the start of an exam to clear the RAM. Little did she know you can just save the notes in ROM that persists power cutoff.

>>dwohni+(OP)
I ran an emulator on my phone but I was not allowed to use it during tests. I had to write complex programs on the TI to solve the math problems on tests(I wanted to be a programmer not a math wiz). I once had a teacher who made you show him that you deleted all the programs, well there was a program for that. :)

I don't recommend using aides during tests.

>>mdszy+ea
Sort of. I'd imagine the hypothetical company would need to do a clean room reimplemention of the ROM rather than a straight rip since distribution of the ROM images is expressly forbidden in the TI license. That seems potentially hard, but not insurmountable, considering the relatively small size of the ROM. And then you get the rest through the emulator.

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.

>>dboreh+88
Back when (and where) I grew up calculators were hardly ever used in math classes and completely forbidden in exams. I later went the IMO route and obtained a degree in mathematics; neither required a calculator.

I still fail to understand why the hell graphing calculators are required for some high school math curriculum.

>>dwohni+(OP)
> 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.

IIRC, most ran on Z80s except the 89 and 92 which used 68000s.

>>oefrha+Vd
Statistics is taking a larger and larger part in many math curricula and is quite aided by the use of a graphing calculator. The AP Stats coursework and exam also assumes you will have one.

>>dwohni+(OP)
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.

>>oefrha+Vd
Don't you find it useful to check that you're visualising the functions correctly? I'd say the calculator was most useful to me as an exploration tool than anything else.

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.

>>gtk40+8g
To learn and demonstrate understanding of statistical concepts, no calculator is required. In fact calculating and graphing by hand are great for learning. To bridge the gap to the real world, a computer, however crappy, with Excel installed, however outdated, is infinitely better. (Not that I endorse Excel, it’s just the most common tool among the general public.)

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).

>>lordna+6i
For the kind of functions seen in American math curricula, no, I don’t need help visualizing them, but that’s me. However, I do believe one should develop their intuition through graphing by hand; typing into the calculator, however painful, doesn’t develop anything other than RSI.

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...

>>notjes+Ha
Well, I'm pretty sure the teachers don't actually understand 1/2 the functionality of most of these calculators even without the model variations.

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.

>>oefrha+Ii
Perhaps you can learn without a calculator, but these timed statistics tests do not function without one. Do you really expect people to do repetitive operations on even n=10 datasets when they only have an hour? You can’t use Excel (because it’s on more capable PC that you can use to cheat).

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.

>>oefrha+Ii
Yes, Excel is superior, but part of the beauty of the graphing calculator is the limited feature-set. It works well for classrooms and especially test-taking environments.

>>pietro+Nm
Maybe they should do as when I learned and reduce the size of the data set.

>>pietro+Nm
I’ve been through tests with statistical problems where calculators are forbidden, so this is completely false.

>>gtk40+go
Where calculators are absolutely not necessary, doesn’t help understanding and more of a waste of time.

>>oefrha+Vd
Yes exactly. I'm about to complete a PhD in physics. I've never once needed a graphing calculator from the beginning of my bachelor's until now. It's a complete waste of money.

>>gtk40+8g
Wtf do you need a calculator to demonstrate conceptual understanding in statistics for?

>>pjmlp+zq
Actually, even n=10 is really nothing, not being able to do that kind of calculations by hand reasonably quickly is more of a reflection of terrible basics, which isn’t surprising in American high schools.

>>notjes+Ha
Many of us do, but resetting the ROM will also wipe out all of the pre-installed "flash" apps that a colleague might want to use. It's a trade-off.

edit: or at least, it used to. Haven't tested in years.

>>dwohni+y9
iPads can use GraphNCalc83[1] and Apple Classroom on a teacher iPad/Mac to restrict students to the app[2]. I'm not sure if there's an android equivalent.

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...

>>dwohni+(OP)
HP used to make their own custom CPUs for their calculators, with an architecture designed for BCD arithmetic using 56-bit and later 64-bit registers. In 2003 they switched their graphing calculators to ARM9 processors running an emulator of their old CPU architecture so that they didn't need to re-write the whole OS.

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/

>>mnky98+er
But Mathematica, on the other hand...

>>dwohni+(OP)
Regardless of hardware capabilities, I remember the TI-89 capable of solving some computer algebra problems that I couldn't get even Mathematica at the time to solve.

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.

>>StillB+hh
> That list is a bit misleading because the vast majority of those calculators are no longer manufactured.

It does have the two most recent HP calculators listed, though. That's makes me pretty happy.

>>pietro+Nm
Take a look at some UK tests for example as they don't use graphing calculators, just scientific ones. I can't say my education was worse for it.

It does cost more to mark those tests than pure multiple choice though.

>>umvi+S2
Fascinating, it seems to have been over a year since the last IP infringement sweep that removes these from the market.

>>mdszy+ea
What do you need a TI ROM for? Programming a full-featured TI emulator on a modern OS is a college-level programming assignment.

>>oefrha+Vd
Yup, none of my high school or college classes required a calculator (graphing or otherwise) and they were prohibited on calculus quizzes and tests.

I had a graphing calculator to check my calculus homework. (This was pre smartphone)

>>mnky98+er
They were a lot more useful when computer access was limited. You could do a lot of practical things on, say an HP-48 that these days you would just use a laptop for.

>>pietro+Nm
You can always make problems with steps that involve "easy" numbers. My experience with high school math was that if you wrote 1.414 when the answer was sqrt(2), you got the problem wrong. So I am not sure what the calculators added, really.

>>ska+PW
For physics specifically, I'd still take the HP-48 over a laptop, because there's no good PC software that provides a nice user interface for doing calculations with units. Undergrad physics (and to a lesser extent, chemistry) homework sets are much easier when your calculator is not only doing automatic unit conversions for you, but also type-checking those units throughout the whole process. The laptop only really becomes preferable when you're doing things like statistics or numerical integration where the sheer quantity of arithmetic becomes inconvenient for a handheld device.

>>jrockw+811
If the answer is ugly, always try squaring it or dividing by pi to see if you get something that looks rational.

>>edflsa+F31
Or use a calculator with some sort of CAS.

>>oefrha+ok
I prefer using my TI-89 over e.g. Mathematica. There’s something about purpose-built hardware that lends itself to being able to do things quickly and reliably.

>>creato+6N
TI-89s use Derive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...

>>dwohni+pc
Writing an emulator and then having your users dump their own ROM from their legally-purchased calculator is totally fine.

>>gtk40+8g
Anything that you can do with a calculator you can do/demonstrate in Desmos.

>>oefrha+ur
For a stats class, even n=10 is tedious and absolute overkill. N=3 or 4 is entirely sufficient to prove the student understands the process.

>>edflsa+F31
Yeah, it's amusing how often that works. I remember taking the amateur radio exam which involves some path around impedance and power. The answers were always in the form of 0.5, 1, 1.414, 2. It's always 1.414 (or 0.707, its close cousin).

>>jrockw+zn1
The ham radio exam is a joke (at least for the technician class in the U.S.). Just a bunch of multiple choice questions from a public question pool. I literally went through the pool twice before my exam and got a perfect score, although I hardly knew how to install and operate radios. (I just needed the license to be able to remotely operate a radio telescope.)

>>oefrha+7r1
If I recall correctly there is no math until you get to Extra. But I agree that the questions are trivial and the multiple-choice format makes it even more trivial.

I am honestly shocked that there are any operators that aren't Extra class.