Relative to other graphing calculators, I've always felt that Casio's offerings were a good value relative to TI- ever since TI captured the education market they stopped being cool and definitely stopped being a good value. I think that having Python is a neat feature. I have strong opinions about calculators in general, and have owned a wide range of Casio, HP, TI, and even some old/niche ones that only real calculator nerds will recognize (like the Sinclair Cambridge and Elektronika Mk52).
With that said, we really need to let calculators go- collectors can still get excited for them, but they are a waste of money at schools. You know what else can do calculations? The smartphones and computers that practically every student has access to. There may be some really poor communities where we can't assume that a student has access to a computer and it's either a $5 calculator or nothing. But other than those really poor communities, nobody spends ~$100 on a calculator without alread having access to a more powerful computer. Smartphone penetration is high even in "kind of poor" communities where most people don't own a computer. Learning Python on a calculator is less transferable than learning Python on anything else. You can get a Python environment on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, every flavor of Linux, and probably a dozen other things that I don't know about. Don't buy this calculator for any educational reason, buy it because you're the calculator equivalent of a sneakerhead.
Graphing calculators solve a couple of problems: they are fairly standardized, equally capable, have a known cost, run a long while on AA batteries and probably most import they don't get on the internet.
Phones, while more than computationally capable, aren't equally capable, have a battery life measured in hours, have access to the internet, and require software of an unknown cost and quality.
I agree completely. I am completely willing to spend real money on an iOS app that is as intuitive and powerful as a TI-89 but it just doesn’t seem to exist.
When I studied at a university, only calculators were allowed to perform some exams. Most of them can't run other software, and it's hard to cheat by using them.
When using a phone, you can install a lot of things.
Math olympiads only allow specific models of calculators for the same reason.
Casio calculators also have a seperate exam mode where they clear all memory and do not allow the user to get to advanced function such as programming or derivative guessers. On the newer models a special led light on the top would indicate if the calculator is in this mode. You can disable this mode only by plugging in a usb cable and connect it to a pc or other calculator.
On all dutch state exams they simply checked this light on my calculator. But a friend of mine showed me already that there exsics special firmware that can fake this light so yhea 100% security will never exist.
Not sure when you studied at university, but you can take a calculator like a TI-83/84/89 and plug in a bunch of text onto a stored program, essentially a free notes field. It's tedious to do but doesn't take too long. And unless the teacher is paying close attention, it's hard to spot.
I recall in high school teachers would actually go over and look through or reset your calculator if they thought you were spending too much time looking at it.
I think your position is unrealistic for an education setting. You’re proposing working computers and smartphones for every desk and student.
Computers and apps are not standardised at all. Disparity between them and compatibility issues are a massive contention when you have lots of people to educate. Not only that, even today here in the UK, not every student has a smartphone or a home computer so you’re instantly discriminating against them. The answer? Grab a standard calculator out of a box that everyone else has and loan it to them.
All students need a calculator for other subjects as well. In science, technology and geography they use them too.
And you can’t realistically control the configuration of a computer or smartphone in an exam.
My professor at the University used to let me use an HP Prime emulator on my laptop for tests, and to some of my peers, they would be allowed to use HP Prime emulators on their phones, it's really difficult to cheat on the kinds of tests where you need these calculators, you can't simply copy your classmate's answer and be done with it, you need procedure to back that up.
And it was $15 the emulator app by hp was worth vs $150 for the actual calculator, and I would never use that calculator again in my life, since in real life no one is limiting my access to my computer, which does everything the HP Prime does and more. I thank my professor for that opportunity
Every kid at my children's school have a Chromebook. The exact same model. Calculators are really relics of a bygone era and it is time education realizes there is greater value in embracing better tech than trying to stop a bogeyman.
While students may need a calculator, I don't think they need a graphing calculator. It seems a silly expense when they already have a smartphone. At high school in the UK in 1990s we were expected to buy our own calculators. Only primary school had boxes of (non-scientific) calculators.
I bought a graphing calculator for A-level maths, but only needed the graphing functionality a handful of times. At university graphing calculators were banned in exams. Only the basic scientific FX-82 was allowed (which cost about £15 IIRC.)
>And you can’t realistically control the configuration of a computer or smartphone in an exam.
And why should you? This isn't the 1860s when exams were being invented. We shouldn't try and copy the conditions that were accidental at the time for all eternity. If someone can cram their phone with a program that answers their exams for them they should be commended for good preparation and we should find another way of measuring peoples knowledge.
You are saying that there exists a segment of the college student population that will spend 100$ on a scientific calculator but does not own a smartphone?
Yes. Plenty. Also not many people pay $100. There’s a thriving second hand market for much less.
When the TI83 was the calculator I’d actually buy 100 or so for low price at start of summer (large surplus), spend two weeks clean and refurb and then sell them again for 3x the amount at the end (high demand)
In the UK, Poundland sells a scientific calculator for £1 ($1.30). It does not have advanced functionality (like graphing, programming, automatic factoring by surds and irrationals like pi, etc.) that higher-end models do, but it should be enough for most contexts.
I don't know how much things have changed in ten years but when I was in university I simply couldn't find a computer calculator software that had the same easy to use UI as my HP 40gs or even a basic Casio fx-991ES.
Sure I could fire up Matlab with the Symbolic toolbox or even Derive under wine but nothing came close to just typing in what I wanted and pressing a button. I guess it's more a matter of dedicated physical buttons and muscle memory.
For any "calculations" I definitely prefer a real calculator. The keyboard and screen layout and the fact most of functions have dedicated buttons are simply superior compared to software.
For rediculous things like running/writing Python on calculator here, I would like to use a real computer though.
>You know what else can do calculations? The smartphones and computers that practically every student has access to.
Not very well, for educational purposes.
The experience of calculating the inverse tan of a number and returning the result in degrees is beautiful on a Casio scientific calculator; not so on iPhone's default calculator (reverse Polish) or a Google search (awkward to execute at all).
It's distracting from the educational point whenever you have to first figure out how to do the calculation on a student's particular choice of app.
Caveat: I'd usually recommend a scientific calculator for most educational purposes, not a graphing calculator; Desmos.com is great for graphing.
I'm uncertain about learning Python on a calculator, then. There are potential educational advantages to having this on a calculator: I definitely think this is worth it for Casio to experiment with. I personally learned a lot on a programmable calculator. It's mobile and likely saves you from a difficult set up process and identifying and installing a suitable IDE that works consistently across student devices (I'd say repl.it does a good job in this space)
The calculators more or less have to have some kind of Python built-in to sell to high school students in some European countries, where some programming is in the curriculum and they more or less settled on Python. TI has several Python-enabled models for this reason. And NumWorks as well (a great calculator outside the old Casio-TI duopoly).
The problem with allowing phones into maths exams is they have browsers and internet connections, and can store thousands of pages of searchable reference material. The calculators allowed into exams are specifically chose because they do not have these features. My eldest is doing maths at the moment and has an fx-CG50, it also has Python but only a very stripped down subset of MicroPython with just the math and random libraries.
I never got the point of math exams that required punching in numbers into a constrained calculator interface. And while I was at school nobody enjoyed that either. (FWIW in the 90s I used a PIM database that looked like a calculator and allowed me to store formulas I was too lazy to memorize ;)) At university math no calculator is required anyways and everything can be done on paper. And when going to the supermarket with a constrained budget, you definitely don't want to stand in front of the products and summing up the items using a calculator (or smartphone for that matter) but rather use your hopefully developed numeric intuition to stay within your budget
Calculators are faster, they have real buttons. Much more reliable than hoping you hit the right area on the glass screen with your not-so-precise finger.
The biggest thing is ACT/SAT approval. If that’s what you need, check out NumWorks[0]. It works on both and is completely open source (down to the schematics).
It's source-available, not open-source. And the schematics sources are not available; but I don't think it would be very difficult to reinvent them, considering the number of parts is small.
On a lighter note, they make it very easy to hack on the calculator, it's written in C++ and in a Git repo at Github.
Granted, it’s not the entire device, but it’s more than most products will give you (none). You are correct about it actually being source-available. My mistake there.
I attended "poor" schools most of my life. Graphing calculators were provided and rarely we had homework. The irony was, once I got to college, for our calculus class we were only allowed to use a basic calculator.
> With that said, we really need to let calculators go
From what I've heard this is actually happening. Classes are done with laptops and GeoGebra (or other similar thing). On some tests only basic calculator apps are allowed.
As someone else pointed out, the benefit of calculators is the tactile feedback of the buttons. Once you know your calculator well enough, you can operate it much quicker than most people can operate a smartphone. It would probably take me 5x longer to do a complex calculation on my phone's interface - time poorly spent on an exam.
Having said that: Once I left university I use a calculator only when doing taxes.
I don't know about the current situation but about 10 year ago, the TIs with their functional setup were _multiple_ orders of magnitude more powerful than their Casio competitors. You could chain an arbitrary amount of functions. With the Casio, when there was no special mask for your purpose, you've been out of luck.
Anyway, I still use my TI-84 Plus, meanwhile virtually on my smartphone using Wabbitemu [1].
I used wabbitemu for a while, but eventually switched to python on termux. The Basic dialect on graphing calculators was pretty cool, but I think future students will get more out of Python on their calculators!
I had NumWorks[1] calculator, which also has Python support. Based on STM32F4 series MCU. Had a decent battery life. Unfortunately it died some time ago, after a year of usage, and I have not been able to use it any more. Using quite common Sharp EL-W506XVL[2] on desk and HP-42S clone Free42[3] on the phone/PC nowadays.
Hi! NumWorks founder here. First of all thanks for the mention. Also your calculator’s battery dying that early is not normal, I’m very sorry to hear that. We’re doing everything we can to preserve battery life (namely, low charge current, no over-charging, and very low discharge current), and our most pessimistic estimates give us at least 10 years of battery life. If you send us an email at contact@numworks.com I’m pretty sure you would qualify for a free replacement.
On a different note, and regarding the original link: we actually were the first to introduce Python on a graphing calculator in 2017. We opted for (and contributed to) MicroPython. Three years later, all of our competitors have copied us :-)
This NumWorks is a beautiful piece of hardware. I recently got myself an HP-35s and it's delightful to use a physical calculator after all these years of firing up Python on the shell.
I use free42 on my phone, have been tempted to get DM42 for ages, but not sure I can justify it. It'd be nice to have a little 4 function RPN calculator for my desk that is cheap enough for me to allow it to stay there.
Well my Numworks[1] calculator comes with Micropython, is open source, and has a color display for $100 which is less than what Casio is asking for this one.
I actually have two of these, one that is "stock" and one where I added access to the internal jtag port so that I could run my own code on it.
Hi! NumWorks founder here. Thank you so much for the mention! We’re trying our best to make a great calculator, so it’s always a pleasure to get this kind of feedback!
As a note to the HN crowd: we’re facing an intersecting UX challenge. The vast majority of our users aren’t very technical - they’re high schoolers really. But we also want to cater to a more advanced audience such as engineers.
Initially we thought it would be really hard to please everyone. But it turns out it’s actually possible to create a simple interface that still lets you do more advanced functions. And even better, designing for the “newcomers first” turned out to be a great guidance when designing our software. Judging from the feedback we get, assuming the user won’t ever read any manual or doc is actually quite a good starting point!
I think the only thing I would do differently would be a 'dark theme' case option as I find the yellow on white lettering to be nearly impossible to see (older eyes I guess).
In the category of "all different", my all time favorite calculator is the TI-92+ which was a landscape style calculator with a qwerty keyboard. Building something like that with the 5" 800 x 480 IPS screen that STM has on the STM32F469i-Disco board would be heaven. It is on my long list of things which I will likely not get around to before I die :-). You could swap the STM32F769 for the 'F469 if you wanted more mips. I'd pay $300 for one of those, if you're wondering.
Good to hear from you, and I really like what you were doing with numworks. Did you ever get past the license issue? To appeal to tinkerers and get a community of hackers enthused it would be preferable to have an open source license.
Also, have you seen the DM42? It's not a graphing calculator, but since similarities exist with numworks.
Hi! Indeed, we don’t ship to Australia just yet. But we do have some users there so I guess there has to be a way to purchase one of our calculators from there.
Well, technically we did send one calculator to Australia. It was a gift to Damien, MicroPython’s initial author!
I have one and I encourage anyone looking for a modern calculator to buy one. One of the best purchases I have ever made. Happy to answer any questions.
Hi! My answer is obviously going to be biased, but I think our calculator is very different from a TI Nspire.
We actually designed it with high school students in mind. We interviewed a lot of them, and we reached the conclusion that on average they were using less than 10% of the features of their calculator.
So we designed ours trying to make it as intuitive as possible. You'll notice it borrows from gaming consoles and mobile phones: that's because high schoolers already know how to use those!
As an example that might seem like a minor detail, we're the only graphing calculator on the market with anti-aliasing. It might not sound like much, but it's a lot of work to get right and that's the kind of detail we like to pay attention to.
Having that simulator is absolute awesome! The fact that this product was merely mentioned in a comment and the you showed up here is the true magic of HN. It always amazes me again when it happens.
I'm liking the Casio FX-115ES PLUS rev 2 ($14.50), because it simplifies rationals and has LCM, GCD and factorization. For example, when you enter sin(60), it gives sqrt(3)/2, enter 1/(1+sqrt(3)) gives (sqrt(3)-1)/2 or enter sqrt(120) gives 2*sqrt(30).
This one can do it, but there are definitely even cheaper calculators that can also do base conversions. One nice thing about this one is that it can do log base 2. (any calculator with log can do it, but with this you don't even have to remember the formula).
It has been a great wonder for me that why US highschools seems to require expensive programmable/graphing calculators especially those made by HP/TI. I assume it was some deal made by these companies with the education departments of the states and administrations.
In most other countries, students complete university undergraduate courses, let alone high schools with only needing a cheap non-programmable calculator, while some courses like an undergraduate course in Computer Science wouldn't require any calculator at all.
UK too. I had to have a graphing programmable calculator for A levels in the 90s (16-18 year old). My college bulk bought them and sold them to us for a huge discount. I can't remember if they were sharp or casio. At the start of exams you had to erase the memory and show the invigilator.
Those things ate batteries!
If you hit them on the back the outside cover of the screen would pop off. I found drawing a graph on the back of the screen in dry wipe marker, and then popping it back in, was a hilarious trick. People would rub like mad thinking someone had drawn it in the permanent marker (I would leave a permanent marker next to it to help them get the idea).
I always messed around (or snoozed)in maths class, and still got an A. It was much later that I realised I actually had a learning difficulty...
As a student, it always felt like a mixture of "better to have it and not need it" and bog standard corruption.
Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.
In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.
Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.
Outside of education (where your lobbyists can ensure they are required by all students), there really are very few use cases for a complex graphing calculator. If you have access to a computer, Octave, Maxima, and Python (or any non-free equivalent) will run rings around any graphing calculator. For field use, the only point in favor of a graphing calculator as opposed to a phone app seems to be ruggedness.
This was the case in Australia in the 2000s. A basic scientific calculator was all that was allowed for the highest grade of maths. Graphing or advanced symbolic features were not allowed.
I bought a TI calculator after reading Americans rave about them, and I used it for a while to try and get the hang of it, but the interface really sucks compared to my Casio, so now I just use the Casio. I don't see what's so great about TI calculators.
You can compare the Casio interface with a web-mask.
Plug in p and q and get the solutions to your quadratic equation. If there is no mask, you're out of luck.
The TIs instead work on the basis of functions like from a programming library. Their equivalent might be a BASH shell with pipes. That is cumbersome on the first glance but incomparably more powerful. You can chain an arbitrary amount of functions.
I once finished a 3-hour exam in 20 min since most of the questions could be translated to a like 5-lines long function-chain that took like a minute to calculate on 10 MHz but were correct in the end.
Well, at least in France, those expensive graphing calculators are mandatory in high school and later if you choose to study sciences.
Some of it is to avoid "cheating" (not using a computer during exams, a new "exam mode" was also recently mandated, with a flashing LED). But I am not sure why calculators are still that expensive today: https://xkcd.com/768/
That, while you can buy a linux-compatible processor for a few dollars, slap python or GNU Octave on it and call it a day.
I think it's in part due to the certification process taking quite a bit of time. Even new incumbents such as https://www.numworks.com/ have relatively poor specs at a high price by today's standards.
Yeah, that's what the "exam mode" is about: to lock down access to the calculator memory, and advanced funtionality like CAS. From what I read, it:
- Disables memory access or erases it
- Disables data transmission
- Lights an indicator
- Can't be disable without physically connecting another calculator or computer. I think some even beep.
Well, of course back then I did an extensive job of using the built-in memory for my "cheat sheets", even building programs with submenus for quick access, and some automated functionality. I don't feel like it really hindered me later. At least, it taught me more about programming :)
It's surprising there is no "Buy" button. A few clicks starting with "Where to buy?" in the footer menu led me to the answer to my question: the calculator costs $60.
> Please note that MicroPython is different from the Python that runs on a computer.
I once considered embedding MicroPython into a (software) product myself, but was dissuaded by the number of people who didn’t like being limited to a subset of Python.
Instead I used Lua, which is much less widely-known but is small enough to embed the whole language.
It’s interesting that Casio made the opposite decision. There’s definitely a trade-off between embedding MicroPython (“it’s the language you already know, but you need to learn which bits are missing”) and Lua (“you need to learn the language, but it’s the same everywhere”).
The "bits that are missing" relate to Python's standard library, which is huge. MicroPython has svelte versions of many of Python's standard library modules... Pick and choose what you need, given your specific context. MicroPython is pretty friendly in that respect.
FWIW, MicroPython, as a language, is a complete reimplementation of Python (and an amazing feat of engineering on the part of Damien and his collaborators).
> MicroPython, as a language, is a complete reimplementation of Python
But there are plenty of differences between MicroPython and CPython [0]. Many of them (listed under “Syntax”, “Core language” and “Builtin types”) relate to the language itself rather than the standard library.
Not to mention that the baseline for those lists is CPython 3.4 - MicroPython is also missing most of the new features of CPython 3.5 - 3.9.
> But there are plenty of differences between MicroPython and CPython
Are there any differences there that you'd consider significant? They are generally quite minor and usually have workarounds. Typically a difference is only introduced when additional memory (either adding complexity to the parser or in runtime use) is the consequence of absolute compatibility. They all seem like a reasonable trade-off.
> Not to mention that the baseline for those lists is CPython 3.4 - MicroPython is also missing most of the new features of CPython 3.5 - 3.9.
The baseline was 3.4 during development but more modern features have continued to be added, particularly if they can be shown to be implemented with low memory use. For example there is solid asyncio support (based on 3.8 [0]), the assignment operator has been implemented and, care has been taken to ignore type annotations correctly. fstring support is _almost_ there too (it ought to make it in to the next release).
The development team listens to requests for new language features so please raise a ticket (or comment on an existing one [1], [2]) to help prioritise upcoming features.
I don't see what the problem is, this is the kind of problems that you always bump into when not able to used the very latest and greatest of a programming language.
Specially one like Python that introduces breaking changes even across minor versions.
But If they could add sound (with a hardware AAC codec), WiFi, SD card and HTTPS i/o with MicroPython, I would probably make it the only gadget I would carry with myself (and also use for reading, writing, listening and communicating, not just computations). This could be amazing - an all-purpose no-bullshit pocket computer with a eInk screen and without usual smartphone-related bloat.
Now I use an Android smartphone which I can't program because of the insane hardware requirements (ans also some learning curve I don't have time for) of the today mobile development toolchain. If only it could simply expose a Python with concise IO functions and a 2D array for the screen buffer...
I wish I knew enough to create the kinda of symbolic solvers available on TI calculators. They're so great but none of it is open in the slightest.
Open symbolic solvers are great and very powerful, but they're almost too powerful. Just a clone of whatever capabilities a TI-89 has on a microcontroller would make me very exceedingly happy.
Yeah I’ve found the TI-89 was a kind of sweet spot. Mathematica is definitely cumbersome to quickly solve a PDE, a small linear equation system, or do some factorisation with trigonometric functions, never mind Maxima. OTOH, linear algebra was kind of a pain on the good old TI-89 once you got into div and curl. Also, Fourier series could have been easier.
I wouldn’t use a hand held to do some Python now, but younger me used to program a window manager in Casio BASIC, so it’s not inconceivable that some kids in high school might actually use it...
The same is true for the fx-CG50. I have one and was able to write and upload MicroPython programs from Linux. The calculator simply appears as a USB storage device when plugged in and you drop text files in the right directory. No other calculator brand I've found can be interfaced with using Linux. You can also write or edit Python programs on the calculator, although it's not a good experience, it is possible.
Oh, the fx-CG50 is also powered by AA's, thus making it an eternal device.
Termux + ipython/Jupyter has almost everything one needs for the casual 'pandas on the move' use case. The value proposition is not obvious, although having a nice physical keyboard helps.
Is there a market for these calculators? They were super cool in the 90s and early 00s but why would one buy these over a... laptop? Or a tablet/smartphone?
Calculators are not exactly premium devices, even though you'd likely think otherwise when you have to buy the anointed model for your kids' school.
That said, Casio is probably churning these things out with a BOM around $5-$10, so you can't really expect much from the display. We're spoiled by our phones, which (weirdly enough) have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android (and can't be used in class anyway).
Graphic calculators are extremely expensive for what they provide (compared to a cheap phone). Only thing holding them up is regulation (ie. being allowed in class and at certain exams), because otherwise, even a cheap phone can emulate a classical calculator (eg. hp 49g for us RPN fans), not to mention more advance tools (from apps to wolfram alpha).
I think a large fraction of what you’re paying for is the interface. Your phone can in theory do a lot more than a calculator, but having dedicated buttons for everything makes a calculator much better suited for its purpose.
Though maybe that’s just because nobody has come up with a great UI concept for a touchscreen calculator.
Yes,i know it's an emulator, but for the same price as a calculator, i get an emulated calculator + a bunch of other stuff, including wolfram alpha, huge database of knowledge online (wikipedia) + of course a phone.
...and on the other hand, i have this always in my pocket.
> have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android
When your device has an app store or allows third party software in some other way it will never have a "single definitive good app" for anything, there will be many bad ones and a maybe a couple of good ones, for math there's this good one: https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics
It appears that the FX-CG50, which has a color screen, comes with Python[0] . Still nowhere near the display you would expect on an entry-level mobile phone, but then probably doesn't have the same power draw either.
Well, its paired with almost equally bad keypad, I so that sort of balances it out. Somehow I don't see writing any meaningful amount of Python on that being particularly comfortable.
With that said, we really need to let calculators go- collectors can still get excited for them, but they are a waste of money at schools. You know what else can do calculations? The smartphones and computers that practically every student has access to. There may be some really poor communities where we can't assume that a student has access to a computer and it's either a $5 calculator or nothing. But other than those really poor communities, nobody spends ~$100 on a calculator without alread having access to a more powerful computer. Smartphone penetration is high even in "kind of poor" communities where most people don't own a computer. Learning Python on a calculator is less transferable than learning Python on anything else. You can get a Python environment on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, every flavor of Linux, and probably a dozen other things that I don't know about. Don't buy this calculator for any educational reason, buy it because you're the calculator equivalent of a sneakerhead.