Hi Kirby, >>> The background image in your blog shows what look to be emulated TI calculators on every student's screen, and I was wondering if the nSpire CAS TIs you mentioned using were actually emulated, yet licensed on a per seat basis which is why they needed to be donated. >>> I have 2 emulators on my Ubuntu Desktop nowadays. WABBIT is for the TI84C and KARMTI is for the TI nSpire CX CAS. These are both FOSS WimpDoze apps I run under WINE. I also have a permanent tab in Firefox pointing to http://sagecell.sagemath.org
>>> My good friend's dad, a civil engineer, had an HP65 and my friend and I could do little programs that even "rolled the stack" as an operation. With parenthesis free reverse polish notation (no equals key either) we had a strong sense of what a stack was, sorta FORTH-like. >>> My first programmable calculator was the TI58C at Cornell in the 1980s which used a form of Assembly Language! It had magnetic strips to store programs I wrote. It even had a printer attached whereby I could print out my code and output graphs! >>> The Unix PDPs scattered about were also plenty expensive. I asked for play time on those and as this institution pampered undergrads, I was given some. >>> In High School in the 1970s we had a 300baud modem connecting to a PDP/11780 via phone line. >>> However, around the time of the PC revolution in the 1980s, even before the Open Source / Free Software revolution, pre GNU / Linux, I started getting more skeptical that scientific calculator era standards were apropos. >>> My first home PC was an IBM PS2 Model 30 8086 around 1987. I also took home a Commador PET PC to figure it out over the summer after my Student Teaching in 1985. >>> For example, I can't make head or tail of why the US Common Core is saying to ignore the "hex rails" our "decimal trains" actually run on. >>> I don't listen to the CC rhetoric, I still teach other bases, truth tables and digital circuits! >>> The bias against doing programming to learn math, when even decent scientific calculators could do that, comes across as foreign. I have to conclude the high school culture is not one I particularly understand, having left the high school math teaching profession pre hypertext and even pre Internet for most intents and purposes (I had a guest account with the New Jersey Institute of Technology on something dialup). >>> All the High Schools I've worked at are programming friendly. However, more and more new teachers have no background or interest in CompSci. >>> I'm less in on the conference circuit these days (I didn't give any talks at this year's Pycon and missed OSCON, though I did help screen the latter's presentation proposals). As Nicholas noted at the eduSummit, I continue actively posting to edu-sig here at least, one of my main haunts for some decades. >>> I speak at local T^3 conferences and LIMACON at SUNY Old Westbury. Recently, I applied to the PAEMST and got denied since I don't speak nationally. >>> I mean I do appreciate test driven development, but passing unit tests that might as well have been written in the 1980s seems too much like living in a time warp to me i.e. it's anachronistic. I'm glad other front lines teachers are thinking something similar. >>> Amen! Sincerely, A. Jorge Garcia Applied Math, Physics & CS http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009 2015 NYS Secondary Math http://PAEMST.org Nominee
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