HP Prime too complicated

[Tim Wessman]

On the contrary - separating HOME and CAS has some very concrete pedagogical reasons behind it and is not an example of "complexity". It is not done for a "convenience" or "technical", but rather it is trying to create mathematical thinking. In all our training materials we give to AP teachers, educators and similar, we focus heavily on how they need to constantly be asking the students "what is the type of thing you are looking at?", "what type of problem are you solving?", "are you looking at numbers? graphs? or symbolic?".

In other words, it is training you to be thinking mathematically. There is a lot of research around this which is why for 20+ years the recommend way of teaching math is to follow that method. Prime was designed from the ground up to be creating mathematical conversations and thinking.

If they can't understand the difference between "am i solving an equation" and "am i solving a number" or more fundamentally "what is a number?" then they are much less likely to be able to understand math. Black box calculators ("i put some stuff in and get my answer out") are a huge problem. Prime was designed to promote thinking about what you are doing, and more importantly WHY you are doing it, so that you will be able to understand math.

It really is simple to use once you learn a few basic rules. It also just happens to be able to scale up far past any other calculator type system on the market. It is also the EASIEST to learn and use at the same time.