Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class

[Eric Rechlin]

Came across this article on Medium today:

https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-ho...ee165045dc

Unfortunately it is poorly edited, with quite a few mistakes, and completely fails to mention other brands of graphing calculators, but it was still interesting.

[Dave Britten]

Yeah, they totally fail to mention the Casio fx-9750GII that's less than half the price of a TI.

[Mjim]

They do mention that Casio was the first to bring graphing calculators to the market, but then it goes on to explain how TI capitalized on it's relationship with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to make sure they were the calculator of choice in the 1980's.

I'm guessing though that Casio did do something similar to TI, just not in the US. For example in Oceania (eg Australia or New Zealand); Casio is the defacto choice for school and I see many fx-9750GII's being sold second-hand. In NZ, a standard brand-new price for the fx-9750GII is about $149.00, which is pretty close to $100 USD, which isn't all that different from TI (much better to get second-hand where you can get it at a fraction of the cost).

And like many things you grow up learning how to use, generally you like to keep using them. In fact the only real experience I have with TI is the TI-30X Plus Mathprint emulator I tried recently, which was actually not all that bad. But that Casio bias is still there, so I can't ignore that I am possibly a successful result of the Casio marketing strategy (aka 'Indoctrination' ) in Oceania.

[cdmackay]

As I'm sure many others have said, when I was at school in the late 70s, early 80s, Casio was the only option, as far as we were aware. The school recommended it (down to a particular model), and that's what everyone bought. It would have been madness to do anything else.

And I find that still the same now, with my daughter at secondary school, with Casio scientific being the default, and only, choice offered via the school.

[Hlib]

This article seems a bit biased towards TI company.

Quote:"Texas Instruments graphing calculators used by high school students 10 or 20 years ago are essentially the same ones students use today. Bulky and black, with large, colorful push buttons and a low- resolution screen, TI graphing calculators resemble top-of-the-line design from the 1990s and are functionally the same as when Texas Instruments first launched the TI-84 Plus in 2004."

There is nothing wrong with the fact that a high-quality and successful calculator is produced unchanged for many years. It is worth noting that the TI-83plus has long used an updated hardware compared to the early series and its software is well debugged and stable.
The author of this article claims that students and teachers at the college are being coerced into using TI. In my opinion, this one easy to use TI is not the worst option for the initial stage of training and standardization of educational process.

[ijabbott]

(11-26-2019 06:25 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  As I'm sure many others have said, when I was at school in the late 70s, early 80s, Casio was the only option, as far as we were aware. The school recommended it (down to a particular model), and that's what everyone bought. It would have been madness to do anything else.

And I find that still the same now, with my daughter at secondary school, with Casio scientific being the default, and only, choice offered via the school.

When I was at school (taking A-Level exams in 1981, to provide some context), most people used Casios, but there were a few people with TI-30s and Commodores. There weren't any rules about what sort of calculator could be taken to the exam (for those papers that allowed calculators), so I took my FX-502P.

The only person at our school with a HP calculator was one of our chemistry teachers, who I think had a HP-65 and might have upgraded to a HP-67 at some point.

[johanw]

I just found this, Desmos was also mentioned in the original article: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/15/test...alculator/

This article is from 2017, I'm not from the US, has anything changed there for using an emulator instead of a calculator?

[cdmackay]

Nice! I did my A-levels in 1984; I don't recall any mandate relating to calcs at that school; although it wasn't clear, I was talking about my (different) early secondary school time, in Scotland leading to O-levels in 1982, hence late 70s, early 80s. At that school, it was exclusively Casio.

I just wish I'd been exposed to RPN then, instead of relatively recently, and now playing catch-up with all you long-time HP users

[Wes Loewer]

(11-27-2019 08:46 PM)johanw Wrote:  This article is from 2017, I'm not from the US, has anything changed there for using an emulator instead of a calculator?

Just this week I heard at work that the MAP Growth tests that our school uses now has Desmos calculators within the test. I found more info here:
https://community.nwea.org/docs/DOC-2925
https://info.nwea.org/201810-Partner-Upd...rowth.html