I’m in AP Calculus BC right now with a TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and I’ve noticed my peers’ calculators can do a lot more than mine. In terms of the current class I feel like an HP Prime would be extremely helpful and easy to use, but what would you say is better throughout college (I’m going to go in Computer Science): Ti-89 or HP Prime? Thanks!
I have a TI-84+ Silver Edition, and I’ve never found it to be inadequate. Having something that can solve equations symbolically might be nice depending on the major. I don’t think they’re quite as useful as some people claim they are though. What you have right now is realistically all you actually need. A TI-89 might be nice in some situations.
I really like my 84 but the thing is integrals and derivatives can be instantly solved on the two i mentioned; and those take a loooooooong time when they’re difficult
And college professors will require you to show all of your work when integrating or differentiating a function. The point of a calculus class is to learn how to do calculus…not to learn how to hit the right buttons to make a calculator do calculus.
Technology is a good thing, but when it’s so easily at hand, it is easy to start using it as a crutch. A lot of professors don’t allow anything more advanced than a TI-84 on exams.
I had a TI-83 plus in high school and college and that was MORE than enough. In fact, many of my science classes required a scientific calculator and would not allow you to use a graphing calculator.
In math classes, you’ll be required to show your work so that they know that you know how to do it. In science classes, you will likely only be allowed a scientific calculator because it’s easier to cheat on a graphing calculator. I never took any engineering classes, but my friends who were engineering majors never had anything higher than a TI-84. I would highly recommend seeing if you need a better calculator in college before buying one. Unless there’s some magnificent, will-never-happen-again sale happening right now, wait until you start school to see if you need a better calculator. You probably won’t.
My daughter is a math/econ major and has only needed a TI-84 for some advanced stat classes (never needed it in college calculus although they were used in HS AP Calc). She did need a “business” calculator for a finance class (something that could do some special interest calculations). She typically uses a plain simple calculator for her math and other classes (including for tests). When she has a complicated homework problem that requires those fancy integrations (indefinite she will use one of the free ones on the internet.) College teachers do not give tests or quizzes with those complicated problems (they would just take too long to do during class time.) Her engineering major friends all use a TI-84 and that is sufficient for them also.
As an engineering student, I can’t use any calculator on my math exams and can only use a TI 36 on my engineering/physics exams so I personally would go with that.
No offense to anyone when I say this, but the use of graphing calculators in high school has gone awry because without them, many more students would fail elementary algebra. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love graphing calculators, and it’s what first helped me understand math since I could visualize what math was. But many schools only use graphing calculators so that students will pass.
When you get to college though, you almost never see graphing calculators at all in higher math classes. In pretty much any higher math class, there’s no calculators at all.
Classes that permit the use of calculators usually only allow for cheapy cheapo scientific calculators that you can find at Wal-Mart for $20 or so. I recommend the TI-36X Pro for students who need to wean off graphing calculators from high school in college.
But that forewarning aside, in high school, buy a calculator that will help you out with your situation at hand. So if you’re doing just fine with the TI-84+SE, don’t spend anymore money on fancier stuff because it will become a paperweight once you get to college. The only time you might get to use a graphing calculator again might be statistics.
If calculators are allowed in exams, take a look at the specific models that are allowed.
Otherwise, if you have any kind of smart phone, you can probably download from a selection of calculator applications from basic to scientific to business, including postfix (reverse Polish notation) options.
I find that calculators almost always become too much of a crutch for students. I work as a math/science tutor in the tutoring center at my school, and I see a lot of calculus students leaning on them far too much. When they’re using calculus to sketch curves, their first impulse is always to graph it with their calculator so they can see the curve before doing the calculus. That kind of defeats the purpose of understanding the relationship between calculus and graphs. If one has already seen the shape of the graph…they aren’t going to have any kind of real understanding of how calculus tells us about the behavior of the graph at every point on the graph. This is a problem if they can’t use a calculator when the exam comes around. The usefulness of a graphing calculator in this situation is that it allows one to check their answer after using calculus to sketch the curve.
Don’t waste your money on a fancier calculator.
The calculator rules in every single one of my classes have fallen into one of 3 categories:
- Calculators up to TI-84 are allowed. Things like a TI-89 that can do integrals and derviatives symbolically are not allowed.
- Only scientific calculators up to a TI-30 allowed.
- Any calculator is allowed, but the problems are carefully crafted so that a calculator isn’t much use or those with less powerful calculators aren’t at a significant disadvantage.
I’ve never encountered a situation where a super fancy calculator would be of much use (let alone worth the exorbitant cost). Your TI-84 should be more than enough. If anything you should invest in a TI-30 or the like as you’ll probably need one at some point.
Most of the students in the schools near me use the TI-Nspire or the TI-Nspire CAS version. It has many great features beyond the TI 83 or 84 and is useful for our BC Calc and AP Physics students.
This being said, as a Calc teacher, I find myself reminding my students that few problems actually require a calc at all. I wish they would use more of their most powerful calculator…their brains. So many in recent years have lost their number sense and can’t do simple calculations or trig relations in their heads
For a basic calculus class they probably won’t let you use a calculator that can do symbolic calculations (TI-89 and HP 49G are examples of ones which do) because that’s what they’re testing you on. For any class beyond that they probably will allow any calculator without internet access. I’ve generally just used a TI-83 or TI-84 because they had them at the library and I like seeing the previous calculations on the screen and I was used to the interface because we used them in high school.
You will probably never need a more advanced calculator than your current one.
It depends on the major that one is in. A lot of upper level math classes don’t allow calculators on exams at all…not even scientific calculators for numerical calculations. But these problems typically don’t contain any arithmetic more complicated than the basic multiplication tables anyway. In engineering or physics classes though, calculators will almost certainly be allowed with no restrictions. None of my physics professors have ever even mentioned any kind of policy regarding calculators aside from “calculators are allowed.” A calculator isn’t really all that useful in any of my physics classes aside from being used for numerical calculations anyway.
Thanks everyone! You guys certainly influenced my decision!
If you do decide to get a more advanced calculator, make sure that you still hang onto your TI-84 in case you take a class that doesn’t allow any with symbolic solving capabilities.
My Ti-89 has never been banned even in my Calculus and differential equations classes.
For my school in engineering there’s never a problem using a Ti-89 because engineering is all about getting the task done with whatever resources you have. It’s more about developing math as a tool rather than an artistic study.
And furthermore, a Ti-89 / N-spire CX CAS will make life in electrical engineering a million times easier when it can inverse Laplace transform, partial fraction, solve equations with complex numbers (so on and so forth) and has an easy way to input into the command line…
Since you’re going into computer science though, I think your current calculator is fine.
I’m a computer science major. I came into college with a TI-84 SE, and it’s the most I’ve ever needed. I ended up having to get a basic scientific calculator for the gen chem series, because any calculator that could store equations was banned. Looking at that calculator right now, it’s a TI-30Xa. While I much prefer my TI-84 when I can use it, the TI-30X gets the job done for basic calculations like you see in gen chem.
As for when I’ve needed calculators, we were allowed calculators up to TI-84 for all my calculus classes. The catch was that we wouldn’t get credit for our answers unless we showed all steps though. So we could use the calculator to double check our final answer and do quick calculations along the way, but we couldn’t just plug in the question onto our calculator and write down the answer it gave us. That seemed to really throw a lot of people off due to them using the calculator as a crutch, as has been mentioned upthread. Besides calculus, I’m using my TI-84 in my computational statistics class right now. Being as calculus is a prereq, the professor flat out told us that it’s in our best interest to have at least a TI-83 or 84 to save time on exams by not having to do the calculus portions by hand.
As others have said, I haven’t used any kind of calculator in my math classes beyond calculus. My experience is limited to a proof based linear algebra class and an upper division geometry class though.