It blows my mind that TI has such a stranglehold on the educational calculator market. Producing a TI-84 must be a few bucks vs. the >$100 they sold them for when I was in school.
Does anybody know of open source alternatives that could be pushed in the classroom? There’s no way they can patent math..
- Textbooks contain instructions on using TI calculators (and sometimes, if you're very lucky, Casio). Teachers can only provide personal instruction with TI because that's what the schools buy (presumably thanks to marketing and dealmaking).
Math classes are already hard for high schoolers. Having to deal with the disadvantage of being on a different platform from your peers is hard.
The TI-84 was worth it for how much easier it made doing assignments. The extra screen space and the ability to easily edit the equations you entered and recall past entry probably saved me hundreds of hours. Just need to make sure I was proficient enough with my Casio scientific calculator for tests and exams.
There's the NumWorks calculator with its emphasis on modern UI/UX and their source code is available on GitHub, but it's not open-source and they recently had to lock things down because of issues with some particularly obtuse national exam boards in Europe about the openness of their platform...
Otherwise there's also Casio with the Graph-3E+E II and the Graph-90+E (European models, I'm not familiar with the American ones) and HP with the HP Prime, but they all run proprietary firmwares.
There's also SwissMicros with their DM42 calculator where they recently split and open-sourced their Free42-based application from their proprietary operating system for GPL licensing reasons. But they target the engineering market and they don't have Press-To-Test capability.
There are competitors out there and the graphical calculator market situation is far healthier in Europe than North America. But to break TI's monopoly over there you'd need to somehow break their T³ (Teachers Teaching with Technology) lobbyist program and their hold on teacher unions, textbooks and politics...
> Does anybody know of open source alternatives that could be pushed in the classroom?
I have no idea to be honest but they wouldn't be that hard to make given the wide choice of portable computational power. Surely wouldn't be all that complicated to 3d print a housing and shove a rpi zero in there or some of it's most powerful cousins. That said, with all the parts and effort I doubt it would come a whole lot cheaper.
there are many calculators which are suitable and approved for classroom and usage in standardized tests, and most are not TI models.
TI enjoys market dominance thanks to teachers knowing them well and wanting to have a single teaching experience for all students, rather than having 25 students and 25 different sets of instructions per class.
Does anybody know of open source alternatives that could be pushed in the classroom? There’s no way they can patent math..