Tuesday, March 4, 2014

47: More Calculator Madness.

Submitted without comment:


Oh, the Humanity ...

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, at some point I guess Casio switched to a concatenation-before-multiplication scheme. This plays out with the Classpad (sorry for the blurry picture):

    http://imgur.com/q8ZruWi

    I respect the way the TI-89 deals with it:

    http://imgur.com/14Nx8oQ

    But I tend to agree with the way Wolfram does it:

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=m%2Fm%28m%29

    This does remind me, though, of the way we use units in expressions. For example, we wouldn't want our students to simplify the expression 6 ft^2 and get 36 ft^2, since only the units are being squared. However, we seem ok with simplifying the expression 10 ft / 5 ft and getting an answer of 2 (as opposed to 2 ft^2). So, we seem to prefer concatenation in some situations involving units, but the rule isn't exactly clear.

    What do you think?

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  2. I'll pick up these two images later when I get home and add them to the post ... my school blocks imgur.com as "adult". -- Curmudgeon

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