Today in algeo, we had an interesting class. Sure, we didn’t do anything and it was pretty pointless, it was fun if you were a complete nerd like I am. You see, we were playing with calculators today–but not just any old calculators. So our teacher walks in after O Canada lugging one of those suitcases on wheels. Apparently, that’s where the math department kept those calculators.

Calculators aren’t terribly magical in this day and age. We all have a scientific calculator and we all know what cos, sin, tan, radians, and other things that were but a mystery back in elementary school. We’d also experienced the magic of the TI-83s and the simple graphing that they did. The graphing was nice, but unnecessary.

These calculators are the TI-92s. They’re basically the size of a PSP and can solve anything. I’ll get to this later.

We started off the class learning how to solve matrices. The regular way was very error prone: mutltiply, add, multiply, add, and so on and so forth, without actually writing all the steps down. You know in elementary school when you wondered why you needed to write down all of the steps? Well, matrices will make you want to write down the steps, until you realize that there are no steps to write down. You just do everything in your head.

Now that gets messy, and that’s where the TI-92 comes in. No mental arithmetic needed. Just transfer the matrix and wham, it does everything automagically. It’s the kind of thing that lets you not need to learn anything, like actually learning how to add rather than rely on the magic machine.

But, the matrix solving took about five minutes. So our teacher goes, “So, do you wanna see what other cool stuff this thing can do?” to which we all approved.

The first thing she showed us how to do was factor an equation. For some reason, a lot of people don’t get factoring. Anyway, she put in a simple quadratic to solve, and it magically came up with the right answer. Impressive.

Then, she changed it so that it wouldn’t factor perfectly. A few seconds later, the calculator spit out a root with radical and fraction. Then she changed it again so it would be a complex number, and again, like magic, it expelled a complex root.

After that she displayed its competence in the art of deriving. A simple 3x² was used for demonstration and then she used it to derive one of those long complicated ones that involve that quotient rule thing.

Finally, she went over to graph stuff. At first it was just simple stuff like a line. Then she graphed a frigging plane. Then she started graphing three dimensional functions. Trippy.

We were then left to play with the calculators on our own. After a while, it dawned on us that these magic boxes could be used to get answers for our calc assignment. And we graphed and factored and solved. And we were happy.

There was a moment of excitement when she said she would let us use them on the exam, since it can solve anything, but she realized that there were two classes. Damn that other class.

At least I have a TI-92 emulator on my computer now.

Tags: math, School

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