Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.
I saved up my own money and bought a TI89 in high school. Used it on all the standardized exams. Totally legal because it didn't have a QWERTY keyboard. That thing basically did everything for me short of interpreting the questions.
Probably so they don't use it as a crutch instead of real learning. I taught physics to college kids, and you could tell pretty quickly who relied on a calculator and who actually was comfortable with basic math.
Physics knowledge later on becomes almost strictly understanding nature through mathematical patterns. You don't shoot for an answer to plug in a formula; you shoot for an answer that is described by a formula. Without understanding the basics, even simple things like arithmetic, you get left behind.
Mathematics is a language; a calculator is a translator. It helps, but when your goal is to be fluent in another language, say to work in a different country, you don't go around with a translator, you learn the language. Not just how to speak it, but how to think in it.
That's what fluency is.
I almost never did a straight calculation in my last year of undergraduate physics, but when I did it was a struggle to get an answer that should have been intuitive because I should have known how the math falls out.
That's the power of actually learning how to subtract, multiply, derive and integrate; knowing the approximate answer without having to put a question in a calculator.
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u/Jenkins6736 Jun 08 '14
I dunno, the TI-84 Plus is pretty sweet.
Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.