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Tim Wessman · (This post was last modified: 05-15-2015 03:02 AM by Tim Wessman.)

(05-14-2015 08:32 PM)leprechaun Wrote: Why did HP implement it? What benefits (besides from having a cool toy) did you have in mind? I am really curious

Four reasons primarily.

1. It *is* really cool. I've seen students and even people who say they hate math sit and play with it for 20 or 30 minutes exploring what it does and how the numbers relate in the equations. That is actually a really compelling reason right there.
2. Being able to very quickly generate some equations for doing demonstrations in a classroom. It makes it very quick to create demos for things like intersections, area between some curves, etc. Teachers at NCTM for example went crazy for this one feature!
3. There is something very powerful in being able to work math concepts from different directions. For example, some students have a very hard time understanding the connection between "this is an equation" and "this is a picture of that equation". Not being able to do the reverse operation, namely, "I'm using my finger to draw a picture" and seeing "oh look! There is the 'math' to make my picture" means that you might not be able to connect that concept for some students. The recommended way of teaching math is introducing that there are different ways of looking at concepts using numbers, equations and graphical representations - and that is the *entire* design philosophy in Prime. This is just a further extension of that and an extension of our goal to allow working the problems in all directions.

You just have to be careful to not *over do* it. This is where something like the nspire falls down hard. Connection between objects are made silently in the back and it is very difficult to understand that there is a connection, why it is there, and very easy to mess things up. For example, you can just "drag" your data point in the statistics plot and it modifies your original data! While that can be useful to explore how outlier impact things, it can give students the idea that they should just "adjust the data" until things look good. While that may be the way they want MBAs to think.... I don't think it is good for learning math. Smile

4. This is setup for even greater things later. :-)