Great. And remember, I need a control group who do not use programs at all.

Here is the draft of the letter I will distribute to teachers. Let me know what you guys think:



To the teachers,


It is important for everyone to be brought up to speed on the present situation. The TI-calculator community is composed up of three main groups. They are the teachers, the lay-users, and the programming community. Of those two, the ones that give Texas Instruments the most business are the teachers and the programmers. By encouraging your students to get calculators from Texas Instruments, instead of from its competitor, Casio, you drive sales for TI up enormously. The programming community is the next leading group in terms of business for TI. Whether it be because we have destroyed the programming of our calculator beyond repair, or because we just want to try out new hardware, we also purchase a lot from TI.

I am unaware where the stigma of programming being a hinderance comes from, but it seems to be present in all teachers of the appropriate fields; that programming one's calculator is, not only a waste of time, but also a keen way to cheat on exams. I will grant that many students do not care at all about the merits of calculator programming and use programs to store cheats, but to embrace just this one group of students as the reason "spoils the bunch", so to speak. There are many of us out there who use programming not to cheat, but rather to hone in on one's own skills and to grasp a higher understanding of the topics presented.

First off, let me define a program. A program is a series of instructions given to a computational device that cause it to carry out certain tasks. The nature of a program, when constructed as such, is not to cheat. I have always been taught that the best test of whether or not you understand the material is to see if you can do it yourself. But, what better indication is there that you know the material so well than that you can give a calculator fool-proof instructions on how to carry out a given calculation, have it explain why that calculation was made, and account for margins of error.

If that is not convincing enough, allow me to present this. I myself will admit to having used pre-made programs on tests in the past. Not for reference on information, but merely for computational assistance…the ability to perform multiple calculations at once. On average, I performed the same, if not worse, on the exam, leading me to the conclusion that regardless of what you bring into the test, not even a program can help you if you do not know the material. All the program does is help you answer the question faster, if you already know what to do. I currently have a case study of this underway, in a larger scale, and will present my findings to the community. If you are interested in the result, create an account on my website, http://www.c2prgm.webs.com. That will allow you to view the "Teacher's Section", where the results, and software made for teachers will be placed.

Then, there is the issue of gaming. One of the chief arguments against playing games on calculators that I have heard is that they mess around with the lists (L1 through L6), which are used by the calculator to graph regressions, as well as other system variables. The truth: Very few calculator games actually interfere with important data used in class. In fact, 95% of the games I have reviewed create their own storage locations, and then destroy them once they are no longer needed. This takes away strength from the most powerful downside to games: students play games during class. Well, outlawing games on calculators does not solve the problem, as students will just find other ways to not pay attention. The fact is that you need to trust your students to have the maturity to say "there is a time and a place for everything, and class is not the time for playing games".

I have heard that Texas Instruments holds conventions for teachers, and at these conventions they speak about the programming community. Judging by the industry's treatment of our support requests, it I can assume that their statements about us are negative. Well, here is the truth about TI. TI releases new software that is (1) buggy (means prone to crashes and other errors; in fact the TI-84+ OS 2.55MP is known to have crashed while calculating 1+1.), (2) designed to cause incompatibility with our programs, such as xLib, Omnicalc, and others, and (3) contains no new features. Many members of our community have contacted TI about why they design these new, pointless features, while their older ones still still don't work properly. We have gotten the run-around, links to the documentations that do not address our questions, or just completely ignored. All the while, they claim to support educational advancement.

As if that isn't bad enough, TI has posted takedown orders against several more prominent members of our community, who have reverse-engineered key parts of TI's operating system software. We have used this information to port our own OS software and run it on our own calculators; we have not used this information to edit or redistribute TI's software and claim it as our own. Instead, we use it to fix the mistakes that TI refuses to. Yet that did not stop TI from attacking our members for copyright infringement. To my knowledge, at least one of these cases went to court, and a judge threw out the case. Yet, TI tells you, the teachers of the world, that we have warped priorities. Well, we aren't the ones who spend money filing cases against innocent software developers, instead of producing better equipment.


Signed proudly,

Anthony Cagliano
-TI calculator software designer
-member of omnimaga.org and cemetech.net

Not bad, a little rough around the edges.  Let's see, 6th paragraph, "support requests, it I can" needs to remove the it.

Also, think of it this way.  About 1/720 (I think those are the numbers) people can program.  It's more or less a mindset.  So while it's awesome that you can program, to a teacher, it is a hinderance in their class.

Cross-post from Cemetech:

Sadly, I have the feeling that teachers won't listen to this. On top of that, if you show them Cemetech, the first thing they'll see are a shell to play or program mainly games, tools to get Internet on your calc (which they could misinterpret as tools to cheat easier, such as sending your answers to other students in class), and if you show them Omni, games are plastered everywhere, even in the site banner.

I am not too confident that they'll see better programming capabilities as a benefit to education, although I guess it doesn't hurt to suggest new functions such as getkey and try to convince TI that they would allow for better-looking programs.

As for a teacher section I guess it could be an idea, but I do not know if Kerm wants to derail Cemetech from its calc programming and hardware mod focus with school sections. I myself added a math section on my site, following many requests, but I try to keep my game focus, so the section was placed inside a sub-forum.

However, to add to my post, I guess it doesn't hurt to try. We never know.

Quote from: qazz42 on August 26, 2010, 04:20:26 pm

Quote

....Due to the risks involved, Texas Instruments does not support or recommend modifications to the hardware. Modifications of this type will void the calculator's original warranty, and could result in damage to your calculator or personal injury....

personal injury? I didnt realize that ndless was that dangerous!

TI has a valid point there about personal injury--messing with electronics does carry the risk of electric shock, which can potentially result in cardiac arrest and death.



Why do you think teachers ask students to show their work nowadays? As long as you can show how you got from point A to point B and understand what you did, it shouldn't matter whether or not you used a calculator program. But that's just my opinion.

True, but there are a bunch of problems in which I cannot go through the steps or else I'll get it horribly wrong.

Like what?

(I can't quite understand what you're saying for some reason, either)

Calculus.  For example, I can find the antiderivative in my head, yet I get horribly confused and wrong when I show the steps.

Calculus: I haven't gotten to that level of mathematics (I'm currently in Precalculus II), but I'm sure I would be able to figure out a way to do it.

Matrix: Oh, that's easy to do, if you know the material. And have plenty of room on the paper.

Yay, TI-Cares is completely ignorant, as usual!