Comment by cloin

My Trig teacher, which was the class where I got my cherished TI-83+, had the exact same opinion of my little TI-Basic programs which worked the same way as yours.

I got an A in that class both semesters, which was better than the B I often got in Math (and a C- once in AlgII) because I hated doing homework. But starting on the program as soon as I grasped the concept and usually blasting through the homework with it by the end of the period meant an A was easily in my grasp.

That teacher was the best damn math teacher ever. He would work hard to help every last student get it, he'd gladly spend his whole lunch helping a kid if they needed it.

PS. I did share some of my programs, mostly with one girl, but she's a successful nurse today so I guess I didn't ruin her future :D

One of the people I went to school with (several years ahead, his assembly class was on VAX rather than MIPS) had to write a program that solved a polynomial.

As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).

So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.

He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.

The adult educator figures in 1958's _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_ had a pretty similar conclusion regarding automation as a demonstration of domain knowledge. The interesting thing is that this view is pretty rare when it comes to business domains.

1998 was just on the cusp of the Nerd Liberation era

thats the sign of a good teacher right there

You both are my people, haha. Did anyone build the connection cable?

>> if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program

Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.

Was this before or after you chose that username? :D

absolute legend. I love that you just rewrote the programs during the test!

I absolutely did this as well, though for the most part you could hardly call them "solvers", just tools to help me more effectively check a stack of educated guesses. IIRC a lot of the problems could be bounded well enough to brute force on my TI-83+.

Kolmogorov, turing, and church would be proud of you, as with anyone that did similar :')

It's difficult to teach ingenuity for a variety of reasons.

To give you an idea of what I mean: I used to maintain the content filter for a school. Students being students, they found all sorts of ways to get around it. I never took much issue with the students who found ways around it. They were exploring and learning. The issue was with the other students. The ones who just followed someone's instructions, never exploring and never learning.

I would imagine that calculators are much the same. Programming them to answer questions is a great way to reinforce concepts. Copying the program off of someone else and finding ways to hide thee program is just plain cheating (of the system and themselves).

Good schools/teachers absolutely do, though. Mine did!

Not exaggerating when I say your math teacher is one of the most enlightened I ever heard of. Fantastic story.

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There was also "group", I think it was called? You could select multiple things, including programs, to copy into archive memory - that way the original would still be there so they could see they deleted something, then you ungroup it later to restore it.

I think this is essentially the same reasoning that Sussman et al give for using a computer to explain classical mechanics in their famous textbook (see [0]). By insisting that the student compute with the concepts, they assert that they will get a deeper understanding than if they just read a bunch of formulas. Hard to argue with that, to my mind, although the choice of Scheme as the language is a bit of a mind bender for newbies.

[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...)

TI basic was pretty frustrating. The best thing I made was a program to calculate default WEP keys for Verizon routers based on the SSID. Converting bases was only possible by recreating all alphabet strings and then indexing those and doing all the modulo math as well (at least it had that!). I hadn't gotten into any real languages at that point but was messing around with qbasic on a Win98 laptop at home so I was just starting to get comfortable with programming. While frustrating sometimes, the challenge of doing complex things with crude tools is pretty refreshing compared to nowadays where you can build an artificial intelligence in like 3 lines of code. For some of my personal projects, I make a point of avoiding any imports outside of built-in libraries if I can implement it good enough in less than an hour, kind of like "showing my work".