Graphing calculators

**Darth-Apple** · May 21st, 2013 at 11:52 PM

Pretty much every math class today lists "TI-83 or equivalent" as a list of required materials. Personally, I always felt $100 was a bit pricey for a graphing calculator, so for quite some years I've gotten away with a Casio fx-9750GII calculator instead. It doesn't have nearly as much memory, but it's actually much faster, and programming it has been quite interesting.

On the other hand, being the one guy in class shuffling through my manual's pages while everyone else is doing math wasn't my favorite experience with my cheap calculator, but if you can't afford the expensive ones, why pay for them?

I personally am a huge fan of programming graphing calculators. I almost finished programming minesweeper on mine, although there was one thing I never quite figured out. Any other calculator fanatics out in the community?

**simlink** · May 25th, 2013 at 10:54 PM

Oddly enough, my calculus class and statistic classes mandated ONE specific calculator (so much so, if you has ANY other calculator, it'd be confiscated.) It was a basic, low-level scientific calculator. Cost about $10. I've actually gotten used to using that basic little thing... Tongue

**Darth-Apple** · May 25th, 2013 at 11:10 PM

I think many graphing calculators are almost too powerful for classes these days. Not having them always forces you to do more work. I've never had one confiscated though. I always just get weird remarks from instructors every class, which I simply ignore. Tongue

**simlink** · May 25th, 2013 at 11:40 PM

We had some people lose their calculators during midterms and finals because it wasn't the specific model. It was some cheap Sharp model. If work required graphing technology we were to use WolframAlpha. You didn't need it on the final since the final was multiple choice. >.<

**Darth-Apple** · May 26th, 2013 at 2:32 AM

At least they allowed calculators though. Some classes don't even allow those $1 pocket calculators, which in my mind just makes the class very stressful. It's not that doing arithmetic by hand is hard, but on top of learnind very complicated concepts, spending the extra time to multiply 9 digit nunbers by pi over and over again just doesn't make much sense.

That said, I'll always prefer my casio over anything Tongue

**simlink** · May 29th, 2013 at 12:48 AM

I know the feeling. Seeing as our exam was 70+ MC questions and a 3 hour exam, without a calculator could have been fun. As it was I only left 10 minutes early. It didn't help my chair was broken... :/

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