Possible death of calculators in education?

[c785]

Thanks for your valuable input, Dan, it has reminded me of a lot of situations I encountered in the past.

This is also why I mention slide rules so often: even if it gives you the mantissa of a product of two numbers reliably, you still have to think to work out the exponent (order of magnitude), and even that simple task will make you THINK and be much less likely to make errors.

Regarding memorization: I used to say that the difference between a physicist and an engineer is that the former knows one Ohm's law, the latter knows three.