Big news from Casio at September NCTM

[carey]

(08-15-2024 05:32 AM)RPNerd Wrote:  

(08-15-2024 12:36 AM)HPCarnace Wrote:  I think Casio still thinks that "programming" for the end user is putting formulas in the form of a short program.

That's probably not far from the truth.

Don't forget that Casio is marketing to students, not to professionals. The programming needs of a student are pretty limited and in many cases, programmable machines aren't even allowed in exams, so Casio is not going to put a lot of work and effort into something that's barely going to be used.

It's not like students are in a professional environment where certain aspects of the workflow can benefit from some level of automation.

All true comments, but they tend to view Casio's ClassWiz series features more from the perspective of limitation. There are two ways these "limitations" can be viewed as enhancements. First, many tasks that previously required programming are built-in. For example, there's reduced need to program a root-finder if the calculator includes a root-finder. Second, some common programming tasks (e.g., loops) can sometimes be performed using built-in mathematical operators, e.g., summation. For instance, the common programming example of summing square roots of the first N integers can be solved using summation (with a nice visual summation symbol) rather than writing a 7-line program to automate the task. The inclusion of composite functions f(x) and g(x) in the ClassWiz series also permit some mathematical solutions to problems that previously would have required programming.

This seems to be part of an intentional transition from calculator specific methods and programming to using standard (and transferrable) mathematical methods and conventions (not surprisingly, the Classwiz CG100 is debuting at NCTM). As with most debates on this forum, issues boil down to a calculator's intended customer base, and the intended customer base for Classwiz series calculators are students, not engineers. Interestingly however, as mentioned above, a few tasks previously requiring lamented lost features can still be performed, albeit differently.