RPN option for school children

General discussion about calculators, SwissMicros or otherwise
goosnarrggh
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by goosnarrggh »

akaTB wrote:
Sun May 07, 2023 4:01 pm
Walter wrote:
Sun May 07, 2023 3:57 pm
So if I had to be a teacher, I'd ask to remove all batteries from each calculator and cover its solar cells if applicable, wait for 20 seconds and allow reinserting. Would that be safe (from a teacher's point of view)?
A 41C often needs hours before depleting its capacitors.
Maybe the invigilator would be satisfied with simply watching as the candidate entered whatever key sequence qualified as a "clear all" command in that particular device.

But for that to be a practical for invigilators who may not be familiar with each individual model from every manufacturer, it would be best if there was a clearly readable interactive menu (i.e. the Clear->All soft menu on an HP32S) leading up to the reset, or else a correspondingly clear confirmation message (i.e. "MEMORY CLEARED" on a DM1X series device - but the corresponding "Pr Error" message in an original Voyager might be a bit too opaque) after the reset finished.
redglyph
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by redglyph »

I think it's unrealistic to expect from teachers and people watching students to be knowledgeable with every brand of calculator. They'll simply allow a couple of models, and nothing else. Or, if a norm were to emerge, they could verify the "exam compliant" label (like the HP Prime and some other calculators have been trying to achieve).
chris185
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by chris185 »

dm319 wrote:
Tue May 09, 2023 11:22 pm
H2X wrote:
Tue May 09, 2023 6:23 am
So they will presumably start working towards the GCSE a year or two before it - will they typically use the same calculator for A-level, or not?
Thinking back I had this Sharp calculator, and somewhere along the way I ended up with this one. So yes, I suspect there will be an upgrade at some point there. In my school a lot of kids went to the TI-83 who did further maths.

Standard issue was this Casio. I didn't do further maths but I suspect that this calculator would have been ok for that even.
I got a Casio fx-350 in my first year of grammar school (age 12) and used it all the way through to A-level (age 18) and university (maths/physics/chemistry). I did do Further Maths (ie. HALF of the last two years of school was maths!)

The fx-350 seems to be very close to the Casio fx-100.

As a straightforward scientific calculator I thought it was brilliant. Basically, I used almost all the functions, and didn’t miss anything.

My brother had a TI-58. I’d guess that at that time (mid to late 80s) maybe 10% of Further Maths students had programmable calculators (and you could use any calculator you wanted).

Interestingly, those Casios had RPN for everything except [+-*/]. You’d do something like:

25 + 5 = sin

Later, with “VPAM” you had to do something like

25 + 5 = sin Ans =

or

sin ( 25 + 5 ) =
goosnarrggh
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by goosnarrggh »

redglyph wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 9:54 am
I think it's unrealistic to expect from teachers and people watching students to be knowledgeable with every brand of calculator. They'll simply allow a couple of models, and nothing else. Or, if a norm were to emerge, they could verify the "exam compliant" label (like the HP Prime and some other calculators have been trying to achieve).
Interestingly enough, reading through the various specifications published by the standards body referenced by the OP, it really does look like they don't qualify individual calculator models at all, and in the case of any uncertainty, they leave it up to the individual candidates to prove that their calculator meets the requirements.
redglyph
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by redglyph »

goosnarrggh wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 1:32 pm
Interestingly enough, reading through the various specifications published by the standards body referenced by the OP, it really does look like they don't qualify individual calculator models at all, and in the case of any uncertainty, they leave it up to the individual candidates to prove that their calculator meets the requirements.
By "the various specifications published by the standards body referenced by the OP", do you mean, more simply put, the FAQ link?

It must depend on the country and the university. Here, only two models are authorized (FX-85GT X and FX-83GT X). The same applies in schools, at least the ones I know: one model is specified at the beginning of the term. By quickly searching I see that other countries have lists.

I don't understand how they manage to verify each calculator, when it's a list of features. Imagine how much time it would take if it only took one minute to verify each student, in a class of 400 students? For those exams, there are several assistants - I think that 1 person per 30 students is a good estimation - but it's still a big waste of time. Even checking against a list isn't quick. A simple label would be much easier to manage.
goosnarrggh
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by goosnarrggh »

redglyph wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 5:50 pm
goosnarrggh wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 1:32 pm
Interestingly enough, reading through the various specifications published by the standards body referenced by the OP, it really does look like they don't qualify individual calculator models at all, and in the case of any uncertainty, they leave it up to the individual candidates to prove that their calculator meets the requirements.
By "the various specifications published by the standards body referenced by the OP", do you mean, more simply put, the FAQ link?
No, I do not. I mean I went from the FAQ back to the top level of the ocr.org.uk GCSE web page, downloaded their GCSE specification document (version 1.5, updated February 2023). It referred me to the JCQ (Joint Council For Qualifications) wepbage to download the "Instructions for conducting examinations" document (revision one published October 25, 2022).

And it all led me to the same conclusion as what was posted in the FAQ.
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dm319
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by dm319 »

redglyph wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 5:50 pm
Imagine how much time it would take if it only took one minute to verify each student, in a class of 400 students?
At the University I went to, you had to pre-approve your calculator before exams. This was a sticker back in the day. I suppose if most people are using a standard calculator, then this is quick to do, with exceptions taking longer.
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dm319
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by dm319 »

chris185 wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 1:14 pm
I got a Casio fx-350 in my first year of grammar school (age 12) and used it all the way through to A-level (age 18) and university (maths/physics/chemistry).
That's terrific, and I guess this means all the extra functionality of modern calculators is not really needed for studies?
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dm319
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by dm319 »

redglyph wrote:
Mon May 22, 2023 9:55 am
Not that RPN is very hard, but I can understand why it's seen as an unnecessary complication when you can type the equation naturally and see it properly on a screen. :)
I'm not sure I agree with this, RPN (or RPL) works very intuitively to me, as a latecomer to RPN. The idea of having the numbers before me and applying functions to them makes more sense to me than even formulating an equation first.
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Garth
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by Garth »

dm319 wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 10:50 pm
redglyph wrote:
Mon May 22, 2023 9:55 am
Not that RPN is very hard, but I can understand why it's seen as an unnecessary complication when you can type the equation naturally and see it properly on a screen. :)
I'm not sure I agree with this, RPN (or RPL) works very intuitively to me, as a latecomer to RPN. The idea of having the numbers before me and applying functions to them makes more sense to me than even formulating an equation first.
Ditto here.  Algebraic shows what you get.  RPN shows how you get there.  I used algebraic first, but later RPN was very natural for me to pick up, and I quickly came to prefer it.

The argument in school calculators is "Algebraic lets you enter the equation just as you see it on paper!"  Well, for one thing, a lot of programming work falls outside of actual equations.  For another, even in the field of calculators, in real life we don't usually have an equation in front of us.  I think through it, "Let's see—I need A, and then square that; now take B, multiply it by C and add that result to the earlier one.  Now I need D raised to the power of E, and divide the earlier result by that.  Done.  Oops, no, I still need to take the log of that..."  That's the way much of real engineering is.  It's only in school that you get canned problems and have the equation in the book and you're supposed to just drop the numbers in the chute and turn the crank—and then we wonder why we get graduates who passed all their classes and yet show a disconnect between that knowledge and any understanding of what the problem is in their circuit on the workbench!  I've hired a lot of electronics technicians and a few engineers, and I gave all the applicants a circuit-analysis test with a dozen simple problems.  Not one of them ever got it all correct.  It was kind of frustrating.
http://WilsonMinesCo.com (Lots of HP-41 links at the bottom of the links page, http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html )
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