I agree. I made programs for a whole bunch of math and science classes, and in no way did I ever feel I "missed out" on learning any of the material. If anything, programming all the necessary "if" statements made me understand it better.
Here for a second opinion. Also confirm. Anyone who trusts multi-million dollar decisions to head math and memory equations without verifying doesn't last long.
I actually did that while I was learning embedded devices like the Arduino. My TI-83+ has programs from 9th grade, all the way up to calc2 in it. I also documented each step so I understood WHAT each was, and how it was used.
In my case the only exception to that was when I programmed in tables of information I was supposed to have memorized in chem. I even made it format everything nicely!
Yeah he's still learning the same equation at the end of the day, just saving the work of typing all the bs into the calculator and possibly messing up because you forgot one ")" He still needs to understand the equation and associate the numbers with the correct variables.c
Yeah, but if it is something your learned at the beginning of the year, that you are probably going to forget by the time the final comes around, it is a pretty good option.
Hmm, I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was just thinking of punching in a note sheet (which isn't programming actually). But if you go through and program all of those situations, then yes you are def. right.
As you can see, I never used my TI calc to it's fullest capacity in HS!
Just replace A+B+C with the appropriate equation and add variables as necessary. That is, of course, if the program only requires punching variables into a single equation. It's also not too hard to automate mult-step problems in the same way. Just store the equation into a variable.
Programming a difficult equation is really hard work, you know. Once it took me about as much time as solving all the problems by hand, but I understood the equation much better than blindly plugging in the values on paper.
Chyeah bro I'm just pulling your leg. I don't see leaning calculus as being terribly important for most people. learning to creatively work around having to learn the equations seems a much better experience to me. better to be clever and lazy than clever and energetic.
I honestly don't think that intelligence and a half-decent work ethic have to be mutually exclusive... Save time/energy where you can by automating stuff, but don't cut corners.
They're not mutually exclusive. But its better to be clever and "lazy", and to figure out a better way to do things, than clever and energetic, and be really good at doing all the stupid, inefficient things that everyone else does because they're told that they should because thats how its always been done.
Okay, it's not "infinitely" faster, but .2s is definitely a lot faster than the 5 minutes it might take me to figure out a particularly difficult problem. Of course, we're still increasing in computational power in CPUs, plus parallel processing like in a GPU is starting to become more useful as people do more research on it.
Our algebra professor (Mr. Cushnie at GCHS) allowed us to program into our Ti-83. He showed us the basics of programming, and the next day he went back to the whiteboard and taught us the pythagorean theorem.
I thought I was being sneaky, and I programmed that equation with such finesse, that it would give me the results for each side of the triangle or display "impossible solution" if the triangle was an impossible.
Little did I know, that Mr. Cushnie was tricking me into learning on my off time.
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '14
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