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