WIRED; It's Past Time for You To Ditch That Fancy Scientific Calculator

[David Hayden]

(08-09-2017 04:29 AM)Zac Bruce Wrote:  I imagine that the time spent learning to program your calculator (not long, admittedly) would probably be better spent learning to code in python

That's the part the the author glossed over. Teaching a non-programmer how to program in python is probably fairly involved, even if they are just doing simple stuff. And you don't want them to get distracted for an hour by some syntax error when they could be concentrating on physics. I think a keystroke-programmable calculator is a great tool for physics because it's so easy to learn how to program it.

One could also argue that the students shouldn't have to worry about the math at all. Once they have the equations setup, why not let them press "solve" to get the answer? This is physics class after all, not math. Granted it gives them a chance to practice their math and see how it's used, but why not do that in math class instead of physics?