>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).
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)