Chris

Idle Thumbs 134: Sports

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I agree with Kojima at whatever E3 that was, guys. If it gets us stories about Reggie hulking out on stage and Jamie Kennedy getting told off by Tony Hawk, I miss "big" E3 too.

 

I wonder if high school calc/precalc classes still require graphing calculators. I suppose they'll eventually be replaced by smartphone apps. You can probably get a cheap smartphone for just a little more than the cost of the calculator.

 

I don't doubt that the desperate need for teachers not to legitimize the presence and use of smartphones in their class will keep such a thing at bay for at least a decade.

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Last time I was allowed a calculator during class (1999) all I had was 10 digits. Calculators were not allowed at the university (not that I would actually need it during any of the calculus, algebra and statistics classes).

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Well, the other problem with smartphones is you could easily have a cheat sheet loaded up on a test. Personally I've allowed calculators on my exams but not phones with calculator apps because of that. 

 

I think we only used graphing calculators in precalc in high school, which is kind of weird in and of itself that you buy this expensive device for a single semester and most kids just play games on them. And personally I think precalc is generally a poorly designed course since it mostly seems to be harder versions of algebra problems that they've already been doing in algebra classes.

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The thing with calculators (in the US) is that they need to be certified. You cannot release a new version of your calculator every few years due to this.

Which also leads to the option to have a piece of hardware still in store that has been out of date 10 years ago and still sells for the same price. I bought my TI-nspire, which was the second to last edition at that point for ~120 Euro. My first smartphone was the first widely released Android phone and it had more power than this thing.

 

Another weird bit I read a few years back is that a lot of (TI?) calcs do not have a keypad that follows qerty is due to the view that anything with a qwerty input is a computer. And computers are not allowed at a lot of those exams.

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The TI-83+ has a 64x96 black and white display. That's a lower resolution than the original Gameboy (160×144). I wouldn't be surprised if the CPU was less powerful as well. And it's $85. I get why the tech is frozen, but holy cow these things should be $20 at most. Way to take advantage of students TI. Stay classy.

 

On a more related note, I remember playing the hell out of a shmup called Phoenix on my TI-89. Also some Zelda game that usually crashed 5 minutes in (but it was Zelda!).

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Man, I remember I had a TI-83 for my math class and was jealous of all the kids that had TI-86s since they were playing cool games that I couldn't run.

 

I have a bunch of stuff to say about XCOM so much so that I don't even know where to begin, so I guess I won't bother. I do find it funny though that some of my favorite gaming experiences of 2013 have been Spelunky and XCOM, which were also some of my favorite gaming experiences of 2012.

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The TI-83+ has a 64x96 black and white display. That's a lower resolution than the original Gameboy (160×144). I wouldn't be surprised if the CPU was less powerful as well. And it's $85. I get why the tech is frozen, but holy cow these things should be $20 at most. Way to take advantage of students TI. Stay classy.

 

On a more related note, I remember playing the hell out of a shmup called Phoenix on my TI-89. Also some Zelda game that usually crashed 5 minutes in (but it was Zelda!).

 

Man, Phoenix was the best. All that I remember from my high school physics class was playing games on our TI-83s and 84s. Poor Mr. Hodgkins, it was his first year teaching and he got stuck with 25 or so apathetic kids who cared more about calculator games. I wonder if he's still there. And yeah, I just looked them up, a TI-84+ on Amazon is still $130. It's crazy.  

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My physics teacher would always walk around the room and manually wipe the memory on each calculator before the test started.  Made it difficult to make progress in calculator games.

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I'm surprised to hear of college professors not allowing calculators in their math classes. Does that mean people had to look up sine and cosine values in a table and manually do all of the basic math stuff when solving a differential equation? That sounds heinous.

Edit: forgot to quote your post elmuerte.

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The exams where I was not allowed to use calculators didn't have numerical values either.

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I'm starting to wonder which is the more unethical economy; steam-trading or graphing calculators.

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I'm surprised to hear of college professors not allowing calculators in their math classes. Does that mean people had to look up sine and cosine values in a table and manually do all of the basic math stuff when solving a differential equation? That sounds heinous.

 

I've always hated the idea of not being allowed to use tools to do things like that.  Closed book tests were the worst to me.  If college is supposed to be preparing me for the next stage of my life, then why can't I use the tools that are actually available to me in real life?  At work we are actively encouraged to look things up and not rely on just our knowledge.  In fact in many cases it's mandatory.

 

I've decided if I ever get an intern, I'm going to give them an assignment and tell them they can't use a calculator or any notes because that's what those classes were preparing them for.  If they ignore me and use them anyway, I'm offering them a job.

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I think the idea is that internalising knowledge is the purpose of school so that there's no time/effort-expensive lookup step for things that should be basic. This has some merit to my mind. The issue is of course that people disagree which things are basic enough that they should be memorised.

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I think the idea is that internalising knowledge is the purpose of school so that there's no time/effort-expensive lookup step for things that should be basic. This has some merit to my mind. The issue is of course that people disagree which things are basic enough that they should be memorised.

 

I guess the way I look at it is that all that time spent manually doing low level math that you learned in 3rd grade would be better spent focusing on more of the high level stuff. I think by the time we reach calculus we've all done enough addition, subtraction, multiplication and division that there is very little added value in having to continue doing that manually. 

 

All that being said I don't think I ever used any of the high level capabilities of my graphing calculator after precalc. A basic scientific calculator pretty much had all the functionality that anyone needed at that point.

 

So yeah, video games.

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I guess the way I look at it is that all that time spent manually doing low level math that you learned in 3rd grade would be better spent focusing on more of the high level stuff. I think by the time we reach calculus we've all done enough addition, subtraction, multiplication and division that there is very little added value in having to continue doing that manually.

Yeah, so banning the graphical calcs makes sense, but not the low-level ones.

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I feel generally that it's sort of butt that universities use standard math courses as prerequisites for other courses that allow access to the full toolsets available to you. I wish there was a mathematics stream for dumbs like me that are more interested in the concepts and logic of math but struggle hard with operations that can be done with a computer anyway. 

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I suck at math.

I can do the easy stuff: I can add subtract multiply divide. I understand fractions and basic algebra.

But once we start getting into really theoretical stuff... I completely blow at it. Maybe part of it is just that math was always taught to me like, "You do this because that's the way you solve it." without any kind of context or explanation, just do it because thats how you do it.

I can't even imagine trying to take calculus or anything like that, it all just goes so far over my head.

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I feel generally that it's sort of butt that universities use standard math courses as prerequisites for other courses that allow access to the full toolsets available to you. I wish there was a mathematics stream for dumbs like me that are more interested in the concepts and logic of math but struggle hard with operations that can be done with a computer anyway.

Tom Lehrer used to teach a course at UC Santa Cruz called The Nature of Mathematics which was apparently basically that. He changed to a course called "Infinity" which I missed the cutoff to get into, and was bummed because he then stopped teaching.

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 I wish there was a mathematics stream for dumbs like me that are more interested in the concepts and logic of math but struggle hard with operations that can be done with a computer anyway. 

 

For something like that I'd recommend the Numberphile youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile/videos?sort=p&view=0&flow=grid

Vihart also has some fun videos too: http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos

 

While I do agree that math classes tend to focus too much on solving problems by hand, I do think that basic arithmetic is a skill that needs to be internalized and practiced. Just like you need a mastery of the words in English and how to construct them to communicate efficiently, you also need to quickly do basic operations like addition and multiplication in order to reason about higher level mathematical concepts. 

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We were allowed to use calculators to do arithmatic, but a lot of the math modules had no more use for a calculator than an English class.

As for trig, calculus etc., by the time you leave secondary school having done higher level maths over here you will know how to work out the trig functions on 0/30/45/60/90 etc angles using the unit circle and triangle magic. Indices are at worst just repeated multilications. Questions were often limited to these terms so that calculators were not needed and this continued into university.

 

I was giving grinds to a relative and he was pulling out his calculator to calculate sums like 2^3. I dispaired, but then i discovered that he thought 1^5 was equal to 5. Sensing and opertunity to correct what would apper to be some bad maths education, we had a 10 minute discussion on the basics of what indices are, and how you calculate them, and if you weren't sure, how to write them down to work them out. After the talk he once again answered that 1^5 was equal to 5, so i told him to use his calculator because it was getting late. He has been 4 years getting into 3rd year of his science course. How do you ever get better if you just run to your calculator each time? What happens if you have to x^2 + 2x^2? Can't really pull the claculator out on that one. 1^x the same. 

 

 

Edit: i like maths

 

Edit: Just looked up those calculators. My friend from america had one! We used to just draw smiley faces using functions. I never knew you could get games on them! Sweeet.

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The thing with calculators (in the US) is that they need to be certified. You cannot release a new version of your calculator every few years due to this.

Which also leads to the option to have a piece of hardware still in store that has been out of date 10 years ago and still sells for the same price. I bought my TI-nspire, which was the second to last edition at that point for ~120 Euro. My first smartphone was the first widely released Android phone and it had more power than this thing.

 

Another weird bit I read a few years back is that a lot of (TI?) calcs do not have a keypad that follows qerty is due to the view that anything with a qwerty input is a computer. And computers are not allowed at a lot of those exams.

 

spork armada, on 01 Dec 2013 - 19:31, said:

The TI-83+ has a 64x96 black and white display. That's a lower resolution than the original Gameboy (160×144). I wouldn't be surprised if the CPU was less powerful as well. And it's $85. I get why the tech is frozen, but holy cow these things should be $20 at most. Way to take advantage of students TI. Stay classy.

 

It's almost like someone selling the original gameboys, never lowering the price, as they started to be sold alongside Vitas.  Or Razr flip phones alongside iPhones.  In fact even farther than back that, it's more giant 90s brick phones against iPhones.

 

The hardest and best tests were always open book/calculator/ in my experience.  Whatever the test was going to ask you to solve had to be really difficult and high level since it couldn't rely on rote memorization at all for questions.

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