Possible death of calculators in education?

[pier4r]

(05-18-2017 12:22 AM)JimP Wrote:  One might argue that it's more useful to train students how to use a powerful calculator that will help them all the way through college and into the workplace

For my direct and indirect experience on the web and in person. I would dare to say than 95% of the users with a calculator look up exercises, how they are done, to replicate them and that's it. There is no inventive/passion whatsoever.

A scientific calculator from the 1980 could do the job as good as wolfram alpha for how it is used on average.

I do remember an exam in engineering that we have to compute the resistance of a non-trivial network with the superposition principle . In short we had to build a matrix and compute that.

People bought graphing calculators in scores just to do that. Like "wait what should I buy to do the job", while I observed that the matrix was never bigger than 4x4 (or so) and I could have worked it with my 506w a bit slower, but still correctly.
(and then nowadays I'm super rusty, see the thread of little explorations)

So if that is the usage of calculators, either real or virtual makes no sense, few people will use them to learn something.