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.
This simple change will improve the quality of education and reduce the cost of calculators.
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.
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.
ClassCalc already does this
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.