Prof says "no" to ti-nspire CAS

[MWarnerCA]

I’m in my final semester at college and my calculus professor says “no” to TI-nspire CAS on exams (although graphing calculators are permitted). In the past, if I’ve see this caveat on an instructor’s syllabus, I steer clear; this time there was no forewarning.

I greatly appreciate the ability to double-check my answers (derivatives, integrals, summations), particularly when the problem is messy and somewhat tedious (on the flip side, I also find frustrating when this beautiful machine provides me with the solution but for the moment, can’t remember how to get there :)

Bearing in mind I still have to show my work on exams, I’d like to make the argument that all calculators allow us to double-check solutions – the nspire, only more so.  So far, that’s the best defense I can come up with.

The professor and I go way back to my first semester.  She describes me as dedicated and capable and, I believe, is amenable to hearing a good argument for allowing me to use it.  Is anyone able to help me make a good case?  Or, as a number of you are instructors, should I just let it go? -Monica

[michael williams]

I'm affraid so it sucks but it is what it is

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[Travis Bower]

Well Monica,

My help for you would be to ask questions right back at ya....

How about doing some researching/googling?

Make your case.

Maybe write an exam that allows CAS, yeah expounds CAS.  Provide the answer key and justifications why your exam is superior.

The checking your work argument only goes so far.  I do not let my students have all the answers so that they can check their work, as in all the odd answers in the back of the book style.

Many questions at the HS level need to be no calc or asked differently when the hh can do them in one step.  Factor x^2 + 10x + 24    vs  What is the smallest value of K such that x^2 + Kx + 60 is factorable with integers?

My next conics quiz will have a no calc page and a calc page.  I go for both.

For now, let it go.  But don't let the teacher's mindset thwart your thinking/exploration.

Enjoy the journey.

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[Mary M]

Monica,

How about looking at it from the other side. Suppose it was not allowed, yet you knew of another student that ended us using the CAS anyway. I would think that would bother you. The CAS certainly can give an advantage on many problems a teacher in a calculus class might ask, especially if the exams were specificallly designed for students using non-CAS.

Some schools/teachers are even allowing the CAS in algebra I classes, but they know what it can do and all students have them so no student has an advantage over others in the class. In my classes I am a firm component of being fair and equitable for all my students. 

I would think you are stuck with the class as it is for now - I cannot imagine any teacher or prof changing midstream after the printed syllabus went out.

~Mary

[Gmail]

Thank you Mary, for your thoughts. 

There are different levels of tech advantage, CAS notwithstanding.  I've seen some students struggling w/ calculators whose most advanced feature is the square root function, to others limited by only scientific calculators (I've given two calculators to the former types). You make a good point regarding only one student permitted to use the nspire; I was not hoping that she would make an exception for me, but for the class.  As far as equity is concerned, that seems not to be department-wide in so much as some professors do permit CAS.

Several levels of frustration come into play here.  The learning curve is steep w/ the CAS and I've become very comfortable with it at last.  I'm pulling my hair out today as I'm trying to learn how to use the 84 Silver  (I'd rather be learning section 2.2 for the quiz Tuesday). Error messages, ugly displays, waiting for the graph to draw, the bleepin' alpha key....  The timing is also crummy in that the new color, higher resolution 84 is only weeks away.  Or maybe I'm just being a brat. :)

I LOVE math to the extent learning it is just shy of an obsession -- which is quite handy, as the first time 'round (I'm an adult re-entry student), I avoided it like a disease.

Mary, I think deep down I knew the end result of this plea to my nspire comrades, but after several false starts felt compelled to reach out.

Thanks again.  All the best.
Monica

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[Gmail]

Travis, thank you for your thoughtful, kind reply.

My Pre-Calc professor also used the calculator/no calculator pages format (the former before which she went around and deleted everyone's memory).  My biggest fault, I'm afraid, is carelessness...  particularly during exams when the clock goes tick tock.  I was relying on the CAS to help me avoid that short-coming which, for the life of me, I can't seem to correct myself.    Thankfully, this professor is generous with partial points.

Enjoy the day... I'm back to the books.
Monica

[~ATH]

Just wondering, does your calculus professor allow the Nspire without CAS?
I'm not sure how this is for the normal Nspire, but the Nspire CX and CX CAS have exactly the same hardware (the only "hard" difference being the colour), so technically it should be possible to cross-flash the firmware: all you'd need to do is make TI's software think the Nspire CX is actually an Nspire CX CAS, or the other way around, and then download the latest firmware image, and install that as the new OS. (you'd need to backup all your documents first, though)

Of course, even if this would also apply to the normal Nspire and Nspire CAS, you'd have a hard time proving the firmware actually does not support CAS anymore, but at least you'd be able to retain some of the functionality you're used to.

[Lionel Debroux]

Hi,

> so technically it should be possible to cross-flash the firmware:
> all you'd need to do is make TI's software think the Nspire CX is
> actually an Nspire CX CAS, or the other way around, and then download
> the latest firmware image, and install that as the new OS. (you'd
> need to backup all your documents first, though)

It's not so simple, obviously ;)
Otherwise, the distinction between CAS and non-CAS would have been made
moot years ago.

> Of course, even if this would also apply to the normal Nspire and
> Nspire CAS,

For the Clickpad & Touchpad series, *unlike the CX series*, it applies,
though it's more complicated than the way you're describing.
That is, a recently released tool called nLaunch makes it possible to
install arbitrary (1) OS on the Clickpad & Touchpad series in a
permanent (2) fashion.

(1): nLaunch can launch the Clickpad / Touchpad Linux port (
https://github.com/tangrs/linux for the sources,
http://tiplanet.org/nspire-linux-builds/ for the binaries and other
links), but in fact, "anything else", as discovered by community testing
in the first few hours after nLaunch was release.
That capability of launching "anything else" (which goes both ways,
IIRC) was not advertised by the pseudonymous, unknown "nLaunch team".

(2): due to the way it works, which we have analyzed, the only way to
get rid of nLaunch is to erase the OS, or reformat the entire NAND
Flash, through the maintenance menu. Then, obviously, one has to
transfer an official OS upgrade, otherwise the calculator is a
paperweight without math functionality.
This shall be a nightmare for the standardized tests which limit the
functionality of calculators... unless they take this opportunity for
lightening up, and making their exams more similar to the real world
(where problem solving, at minimum cost, matters, and artificial
restrictions are nuisances) ?

Of course, whoever uses nLaunch for "other" purposes, and gets caught,
will face the consequences - assuming there's a valid reason they get
caught and face consequences, of course: in the standardized tests of my
country, the CAS is allowed.


This thread makes me think that I forgot to update the "Several fun
facts about the Nspire family..." (
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/tinspire/GQJO45-kXyk
) threads after the release of nLaunch... Oh well, that's a task for
another day.


Lionel.

[MWarnerCA]

My professor and I have reached a compromise.  She will permit the non-CAS version of the Nspire, so at least in that respect, I'll be back in my comfort zone.

Lionel, ATH, with all due respect I thank you for your efforts and responses but what you suggest...  IS beyond my comfort zone.  Perhaps it will be of value to another.

Monica

[Tony]

Reminds me of a situation which occurred with my daughter her freshman year in college. Her professor wanted TI-83s only and her roommates professor wanted TI-82s only...they traded calculators and all was well...BTW, my daughter ended up with the 83 in the end, I do not know why...

Tony

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[Ali Morshedi]

Hi

I'm really sorry, but I have to take your professor's side.
It seems an awfully bad idea to allow students to bring TI for courses
like calculus.
I'm sure you'll use it only to check the answers you've
calculated,however, I'm pretty certain that many
will get the answer first and try to find a solution!
It is alright to not be sure of your answers. In science and
engineering, the correct answer is never presented to you.
You have to think and plan and find an answer that with good judgement
you can present as a "correct" one.
Of course that's my opinion and I may be wrong.
good luck

[Gmail]

Ali, there are a number of professors who will say you're NOT wrong.  I cannot fault any teacher who decides for his/her students that CAS is not allowed because some students are capable of using it as a substitution for knowing the material. 

In first grade I took 2nd place at a spelling bee because "nice" is spelled N-I-C-E (not, as it turns out, N-I-S-E) -- I know the calculus material, but four decade later I still need an idiot check :)

Thank you for your input... enjoy the weekend.

[michael williams]

But when you get on the job you are not going to get paid to solve these thing by hand there is nothing wrong with using a calculator it is a tool

[Lana Golembeski]

Absolutely true! You need to know what your resources are and how to use them. But that does require an understanding of the math. 

Sent from my iPhone

Lana

[TRMP]

Thinking like u say, u dont believe is possible learn with resource TI has? Hmm make some program to solve a calculus problem? In other words Im trying to say is change the way to teach and not proihibit the tecnology, just a tool to learn,inst the knowledge.. Sorry for this english. Here im Brazil is same problem. ;-)

[Don]

As a 68 year old calculator nerd (my first calculator was the HP-80 in the 70's) I now have the CX CAS hand held, on my MAC Pro, and now on my iPad (only $29.99 a bargain!). I worked for over 30 years as a data analyst for the federal government. We used SAS for that. Learning to use SAS taught me a lot of math. I am now a long-term substitute for a high school math teacher. The math department frowns on showing the students how to use the full potential of their dinosaur TI-83's. But when it comes to a chapter on linear regression, they expect the students to pick it up immediately. Go figure! They don't teach them mathematical programming on the calculators. They don't even teach them to string calculations together. All the new technology from logarithms, to slide rules, to calculators has been has been looked at as an obstacle to learning "math". 99.9% of these students will not be mathematicians. What they need is to learn how to use a tool that will do the math (the grunt work) for them. To use the tool, they need to at least understand the problem and how the tool will help them. I am teaching linear models; given a number of data points they need to determine if the data points represents a linear function. They need to determine the slope between all successive data points to see if the slope is constant. That is a lot of calculations to do; it would be much easier for them to learn how to create a simple program to do all the calculations at once. I say use the tools that are available; in their future jobs they will never do anything by hand.

[Al Coons Lists]

Don,
Can you be clearer why they are finding the slopes between successive points to decide if a linear model is appropriate? The standard approach to this question is residual analysis which all the TI-8x and Nspires do well.

I do not believe the line between two consecutive sample data would NOT be expected to have a consistent slope even if the the best model is linear.
Al

On Feb 19, 2013, at 6:40 PM, Don <don.ph...@gmail.com> wrote:

> As a 68 year old calculator nerd (my first calculator was the HP-80 in the 70's) I now have the CX CAS hand held, on my MAC Pro, and now on my iPad (only $29.99 a bargain!). I worked for over 30 years as a data analyst for the federal government. We used SAS for that. Learning to use SAS taught me a lot of math. I am now a long-term substitute for a high school math teacher. The math department frowns on showing the students how to use the full potential of their dinosaur TI-83's. But when it comes to a chapter on linear regression, they expect the students to pick it up immediately. Go figure! They don't teach them mathematical programming on the calculators. They don't even teach them to string calculations together. All the new technology from logarithms, to slide rules, to calculators has been has been looked at as an obstacle to learning "math". 99.9% of these students will not be mathematicians. What they need is to learn how to use a tool that will do the math (the grunt work) for them. To use the tool, they need to at least understand the problem and how the tool will help them. I am teaching linear models; given a number of data points they need to determine if the data points represents a linear function. They need to determine the slope between all successive data points to see if the slope is constant. That is a lot of calculations to do; it would be much easier for them to learn how to create a simple program to do all the calculations at once. I say use the tools that are available; in their future jobs they will never do anything by hand.
>

[Don]

Al,

This is a remedial algebra class I'm substituting in.  The chapter we were doing was on slopes and linear models.  So at times the students were given 4 or 5 data sets of 6 to 8 data points and asked to tell if the data set were linear or not linear.  And if linear, to tell what the slope was.  To do so they had to calculate the slopes between successive points to see if the slope was constant over the data set.  For some reason the math department at this school frowns on teaching the students how to use their calculators beyond adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, and then only two numbers at a time.  And, not to the students' credit, they show no desire to learn on their own how to use and program their TI-83s, the calculators supplied by the school.

Don