Greeting AJG -- 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.
Apologies for my ignorance about the current state of the calculator market. My own trajectory through high school was discovering programmable calculators as an extracurricular hobby. 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. As long as computers were big and expensive like we had at the university, I could understand why we weren't sharing programming with the high schools. The IBM 370 I was sending my programs to (PL/1, FORTRAN, Snobol, APL) was huge, had its own building (shared with a 360 as I recall). 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. 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. The screens were so tiny and what about 3D? Programming is really more interesting but the calculator languages were so black boxy and tied to the one device.... We I do appreciate about the scientific calculator is who much they densely pack in to a tiny box. Going over each key, explaining what it does, is all by itself the basis for a good course. But that wasn't usually the approach taken. Only a few keys would be explained, their meanings leaked out in dribs and drabs over the years. Not so fun. Like with any subject, sticking to the standard timeline can lead to high levels of frustration. One must undertake to study to on one's own to move ahead at one's own pace. One may wish to go faster or slower, and also take detours, explore tangents. Anyway, I'm preaching to the choir here aren't I? By the time we get to Linux and Freedom Toasters in the Republic of South Africa [1], I'm getting closer to flabbergasted that we're still clinging to the graphing calculators throughout high school. I'm beginning to sense I'm a stranger in a strange land. By this point in 2016, yet more years later, I'm rather uncomprehending of the status quo, which seems somewhat bizarre to me, like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice and Wonderland. 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. 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). In the year since, I have field tested numerous courses with real high and middle school aged guinea pigs (willing and eager), mostly with a nonprofit called Saturday Academy, but these were not for state credit and of a somewhat experimental nature. As a parent volunteer, I was permitted to teach an all 8th grade Python-based course at Winterhaven, our "geek Hogwarts" in Portland, and some of the content I covered is summarized here: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/winterhaven/ http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/winterhaven/section3.html I'd summarize some of the "lessons learned" (such as to balance technical content with lore, storytelling) and take these on the road to Pycons and OSCONs, most concertedly to Chicago, the city of my birth. 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. Speaking of Nicholas Tollervey, I was at PDX Code Guild this evening for Flying Circus night, and for the first time really had a chance to dive in to his slim volume Python in Education, Teach, Learn, Program (O'Reilly) https://flic.kr/p/JA7ene (book cover) The book shares in some detail about the hardware devices we could be sharing with more students, in addition to running Python in the cloud and/or on desktops / laptops and/or on Android / iOS (again, I'm not myself very tolerant of tiny screens and keyboards for writing / reading code). https://flic.kr/p/Jx87k5 (Raspberry Pi) https://flic.kr/p/Jx85V1 (MicroPython board) https://flic.kr/p/Jx85tj (Microbit) The shift in emphasis to devices such as these seems to already be a fait accompli in many education systems. The main argument against joining the trend seems to be the nature of the tests themselves, which are defined around using a calculator. Isn't that the tail wagging the dog though? 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. Kirby [1] http://www.freedomtoaster.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Toaster
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