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I had a few days off over the holidays, so passing the time in front of NFL football and World Junior hockey on TV (-25 C outside...), I started transferring iPad apps onto my new iPad Air. While doing this, I decided to search for new apps that emulate graphing calculators. I now have four such on both iPads: RCL-59 (TI-59), i41CX+ (HP-41CX), i48 (HP-48GX) and HP50G (HP-50g).
I went through university using a TI-59, and I have never been converted to the RPN cult, which gave rise to the purchase of my post-university calculators, both TI: a TI-81 and the one I use now, a TI-89 Titanium. In light of that, and perhaps because I am now in a physical and cerebral midlife crisis, I rationalized that having the three HP emulators wouldn't do me much good without having the original calculator manuals, so I found and downloaded all of them in PDF format - in aggregate, thousands of pages of documentation. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to pick up my TI-89-T and teach myself how to program it, which is something I always wanted to do but never took the time. I hooked it up to the PC and refreshed myself with the associated TI Connect software and various user documentation. After an evening spent between that and doing some on-line web searching related to a gamut of pseudo-related topics, I came across some articles and points of view that were thought-provoking and somewhat disturbing.
There is a rapidly growing camp that shares the opinion that handheld calculators of any kind are already obsolete, and have been for about a decade. But for the fact that educators mandate their use (by association, forbid the use of iPads, iPhones, PDA devices and certain models of scientific / graphing handhelds) on examinations, there would no longer be a market for them. More disturbing was the suggestion that Texas Instruments has been able to gain and maintain the vast majority of the market share by working collaboratively with educators and textbook authors to implement an educational system in which the course material in math and science curriculae is integrated with their technology, indeed to the point where you need one in order to succeed in the other. It is further suggested that this alone will perpetuate the necessity and, therefore, existence of calculators (particularly TI calculators) long beyond what would otherwise spell their demise. This might explain why you don't find a lot of TI calculator apps for the iPad or iPhone, since it wouldn't make a lot of sense to spend several hundreds of dollars on a device when an equivalent app could be purchased for 5% of the cost.
I personally like calculators. I like the look and feel of them, and I like the fact that they do exactly what they are designed to do (for the most part - bugs aside). I like picking up a pencil, ruler, eraser and calculation paper pad and solving a problem, using a calculator to the extent required in support of this endeavour. However, I have an iPad at work with numerous good apps installed - Math Studio for example - that replaces a lot of the functionality that my calculator used to have. I also have a PC workstation with two big screens and MS Office. I am now in a mode at work where most of the time I spend pushing buttons on my TI-89-T is in a conference room in design review meetings; even then, I often pull out my iPhone for unit conversions because using the app is faster than pushing the buttons on the calculator.
My question is twofold (threefold maybe):
After graduating from school, are handheld calculators worthless due to their apparent obsolescence relative to emerging technologies?
For that matter, is the combination of "calculation paper + pencil + eraser + ruler + calculator" obsolete and worthless?
With the increased use of and dependence on current and emerging technologies, are we still nevertheless educating students and producing practitioners that "can do the math" rather than simply "correctly enter the data" and, if indeed we are, then are folks like me who still "go retro" and "do things Old School" becoming more worthless and obsolete?
I went through university using a TI-59, and I have never been converted to the RPN cult, which gave rise to the purchase of my post-university calculators, both TI: a TI-81 and the one I use now, a TI-89 Titanium. In light of that, and perhaps because I am now in a physical and cerebral midlife crisis, I rationalized that having the three HP emulators wouldn't do me much good without having the original calculator manuals, so I found and downloaded all of them in PDF format - in aggregate, thousands of pages of documentation. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to pick up my TI-89-T and teach myself how to program it, which is something I always wanted to do but never took the time. I hooked it up to the PC and refreshed myself with the associated TI Connect software and various user documentation. After an evening spent between that and doing some on-line web searching related to a gamut of pseudo-related topics, I came across some articles and points of view that were thought-provoking and somewhat disturbing.
There is a rapidly growing camp that shares the opinion that handheld calculators of any kind are already obsolete, and have been for about a decade. But for the fact that educators mandate their use (by association, forbid the use of iPads, iPhones, PDA devices and certain models of scientific / graphing handhelds) on examinations, there would no longer be a market for them. More disturbing was the suggestion that Texas Instruments has been able to gain and maintain the vast majority of the market share by working collaboratively with educators and textbook authors to implement an educational system in which the course material in math and science curriculae is integrated with their technology, indeed to the point where you need one in order to succeed in the other. It is further suggested that this alone will perpetuate the necessity and, therefore, existence of calculators (particularly TI calculators) long beyond what would otherwise spell their demise. This might explain why you don't find a lot of TI calculator apps for the iPad or iPhone, since it wouldn't make a lot of sense to spend several hundreds of dollars on a device when an equivalent app could be purchased for 5% of the cost.
I personally like calculators. I like the look and feel of them, and I like the fact that they do exactly what they are designed to do (for the most part - bugs aside). I like picking up a pencil, ruler, eraser and calculation paper pad and solving a problem, using a calculator to the extent required in support of this endeavour. However, I have an iPad at work with numerous good apps installed - Math Studio for example - that replaces a lot of the functionality that my calculator used to have. I also have a PC workstation with two big screens and MS Office. I am now in a mode at work where most of the time I spend pushing buttons on my TI-89-T is in a conference room in design review meetings; even then, I often pull out my iPhone for unit conversions because using the app is faster than pushing the buttons on the calculator.
My question is twofold (threefold maybe):
After graduating from school, are handheld calculators worthless due to their apparent obsolescence relative to emerging technologies?
For that matter, is the combination of "calculation paper + pencil + eraser + ruler + calculator" obsolete and worthless?
With the increased use of and dependence on current and emerging technologies, are we still nevertheless educating students and producing practitioners that "can do the math" rather than simply "correctly enter the data" and, if indeed we are, then are folks like me who still "go retro" and "do things Old School" becoming more worthless and obsolete?
