to be jealous of my son's calculator

[JoanByers]

DS is 10, just bought him his first calculator. Apparently they were using them at school and he's never used them, so wasn't doing very well with it.

Went into Rymans and bought one for £7, I'm in shock, it does everything for you, and gives you nice answers like 3π instead of 9.424777 or 4√2 rather than 5.65685, and has multiline fractions and will factorise numbers and so on.

I had an expensive programmable calculator for my maths A Level, but this is much better.

Kids these days, eh, don't even know they are born.

Lol, I remember my calculator was a bloody brick of a thing that cost the Earth (well to me then it did) and was a hideously fiendish bit of kit! I've still got it and it looks out of the ark compared to calculators now! We still had an abacus we had to use and I'm not even that old.

Although I have to say 3&#960 as in the op would confuse me a little bit!

YANBU - but I always use a calculator now (apart from the well used formulas I do every day) and have one on my phone for tricky on the fly 'emergency' maths. I imagine I'm not alone in this.

Those were supposed to be pi and square root symbols!

I did wonder if it was some mysterious and scary new mathematics that had been introduced while I wasn't looking.

On a slightly different note I find it oddly amusing that MN has script that lets us and but doesn't recognise pi or SqR... no more sugar for me tonight I think.

My calculator can do algebra, calculus, complex statistical calculations, draw graphs and a whole shed load of other stuff I never use.

I love it; I call it the Beast.

I come from the days when we used log tables and slide rules in school, and somehow the novelty of these new fangled adding machines has never worn off.

When I did A-level maths in 1998, many people used graphics calculators.

But in the last few years, the "drawing graphs" ones seem to have been done away with, now replaced with the ones where you can enter formulae exactly as they appear, described above.

I don't think these calculators "replace" students' ability to do maths - many exams have at least one non-calculator paper.

I tutor in maths, and although I think the new ones are good, I miss the being able to draw graphs instantly - I use my laptop to demonstrate this to students, and I encourage them to do likewise.

One thing I do think is good with the new ones is being able to give letters values, so pupils can check their algebra - but schools clearly don't encourage pupils to use this, because 9 out of 10 of my students have never seen it before.