Part of learning mathematics is actually doing the math. Fat chance.įor high school? I am sorry, but that is a huge fail. Getting back to my earlier remarks about gruntwork, though, my best choice for this - if only it existed- would be a TI-89 that does RPN (with the nice clicky keys and the big "Enter" button exactly under the index finger). And using any calculator to find points of inflexion on a curve is just a big time-waster when you can scribble them with a pencil much faster than you can punch the keys. When I studied first-year maths at Uni, most of my fellow-students never even got to grips with the fundamental theorem of calculus, which of course means that for the entirety of the course, they were parroting little mini-formulae without really understanding how it fitted together.
My contention is that any calculator often tends to become a crutch that actually gets in the way of learning, in the sense that it effectively encourages the student to spit out the "answer", when the point is to understand how it is obtained. I'm not writing this as a luddite (or not entirely): I own an HP48G+ and a TI-89, and I'll admit that they are a useful means to take the gruntwork out of a lot of calculations (especially the TI-89 with its capacity for symbolic differentiation and integration). The best calculator for education (IMO) is none at all.
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Where Texas Instruments graphing calculators include a programming framework accessible even to amateurs, writing code for an iPad is restricted to those who purchase an Apple developer account, create programs that align with Apple standards, and submit their finished products for Apple's approval prior to distribution.'"
Nichols, who's currently pursuing a PhD in education, laments, 'The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools, but like those that came before, its ostensibly subversive shell houses a fairly conventional approach to learning. Just messing around with TI-BASIC on a TI-83 Plus, Nichols recalls, 'helped me cultivate many of the overt and discrete habits of mind necessary for autonomous, self-directed learning.' So, with all those fancy iPads at their schools, today's kids must really be programming up a storm, right? Wrong.
Theodp writes "Writing in The Atlantic, Phil Nichols makes a convincing case for why educational technologies should be more like graphing calculators and less like iPads.
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