[Edu-sig] more follow-up re Pycon / EduSummit

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Hi Kirby, 
>>>
The background image in your blog shows what look to
be emulated TI calculators on every student's screen,
and I was wondering if the nSpire CAS TIs you mentioned
using were actually emulated, yet licensed on a per seat
basis which is why they needed to be donated.  
>>>
I have 2 emulators on my Ubuntu Desktop nowadays. 
WABBIT is for the TI84C and KARMTI is for the TI nSpire CX CAS.
These are both FOSS WimpDoze apps I run under WINE.
I also have a permanent tab in Firefox pointing to http://sagecell.sagemath.org

>>>
My good friend's dad, a civil engineer, had an HP65 and 
my friend and I could do little programs that even "rolled 
the stack" as an operation.  With parenthesis free reverse
polish notation (no equals key either) we had a strong 
sense of what a stack was, sorta FORTH-like.
>>>
My first programmable calculator was the TI58C at Cornell in the 1980s which used a form of Assembly Language!
It had magnetic strips to store programs I wrote. 
It even had a printer attached whereby I could print out my code and output graphs!

>>>
The Unix PDPs scattered about were also plenty 
expensive.  I asked for play time on those and as this
institution pampered undergrads, I was given some.
>>>
In High School in the 1970s we had a 300baud modem connecting to a PDP/11780 via phone line.

>>>
However, around the time of the PC revolution in the
1980s, even before the Open Source / Free Software 
revolution, pre GNU / Linux, I started getting more 
skeptical that scientific calculator era standards were 
apropos.  
>>>
My first home PC was an IBM PS2 Model 30 8086 around 1987.
I also took home a Commador PET PC to figure it out over the summer after my Student Teaching in 1985.

>>>
For example, I can't make head or tail of why the US
Common Core is saying to ignore the "hex rails" our 
"decimal trains" actually run on.  
>>>
I don't listen to the CC rhetoric, I still teach other bases, truth tables and digital circuits! 

>>>
The bias against doing programming to learn math, 
when even decent scientific calculators could do that, 
comes across as foreign.  I have to conclude the 
high school culture is not one I particularly understand, 
having left the high school math teaching profession pre 
hypertext and even pre Internet for most intents and 
purposes (I had a guest account with the New Jersey 
Institute of Technology on something dialup).
>>>
All the High Schools I've worked at are programming friendly. 
However, more and more new teachers have no background or interest in CompSci.

>>>
I'm less in on the conference circuit these days (I didn't give 
any talks at this year's Pycon and missed OSCON, though I 
did help screen the latter's presentation proposals).  As 
Nicholas noted at the eduSummit, I continue actively 
posting to edu-sig here at least, one of my main haunts 
for some decades.
>>>
I speak at local T^3 conferences and LIMACON at SUNY Old Westbury.
Recently, I applied to the PAEMST and got denied since I don't speak nationally.

>>>
I mean I do appreciate test driven development, but passing 
unit tests that might as well have been written in the 1980s 
seems too much like living in a time warp to me i.e. it's 
anachronistic.  I'm glad other front lines teachers are thinking
something similar.
>>>
Amen!

Sincerely, 
A. Jorge Garcia 
Applied Math, Physics & CS 
http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com 
http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009 
2015 NYS Secondary Math http://PAEMST.org Nominee
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