Different mobile phone jammers are complementary
Several mobile applications are introduced as complete scientific calculators. But high school students equipped with traditional Casio or Texas Instruments calculators, can they really rely on these mobile jammer tools in their math class? At the beginning of the 2019 school year, the calculator was not included in the list of school supplies models provided by the Ministry of Education, but it was almost an indispensable object: once the second entry was entered, it was necessary to invest in a new calculator. Buying a reference model (such as TI 82 Advanced or Casio Graph 35 + E) will cost nearly 50 euros. The difference between scientific calculators and traditional calculators lies in the addition of several options (for example, scientific notation or drawing).
Can mobile apps change the rules of the game? A simple search in app stores like the Apple App Store shows that there are a few apps that present themselves as real scientific calculators, which will be very complete. Most of them are free. But how much are they really worth? Can high school students use it as a traditional computer for math homework?
Calculator#, ACalc, Calc Pro, Panecal, Calculator+...It is not easy to navigate between all these free apps. Franck Duffaud, a mathematics teacher at Lycée Victor Duruy in Paris, tested their Numerama writing. Its conclusion is clear: most of these interfaces are not perfect. In this choice, he only retained some interesting points. "Teacher# allows you to perform formal calculations and factorization," the math teacher explained. It gives increments, which allows the solution to be considered as a fraction, without giving free radicals. Development is very simple. "
As for the other apps on this list, Franck Duffaud adds that they are nowhere near the scientific calculators recommended in class. "Other apps are not interested. Either they all have advertisements [Please note: in this case, ACalc will broadcast the advertisement by clicking a button a few seconds after opening the app, and Panecal will contain the advertisement slogan Advertising Calculator above] Or they add nothing more than those already basic in smartphones," the professor said.
Franck Duffaud explained to us that his high school students have recently been using a new calculator that can be used as a free mobile app on their smartphones (market leaders Casio and Texas Instruments does not provide except for its machines): NumWorks. The company introduced this new calculator two years ago. "NumWorks' new calculator has replaced most scientific calculator applications," said the teacher, who is accustomed to using the simulator provided by NumWorks for free in teaching.
To understand the future of the calculator, we contacted Romain Goyet, an engineer and founder of NumWorks. The entrepreneur told Numerama: "I started with a simple observation." In order to learn mathematics from the second grade, students have been given a terrible object since the 1980s. This is beyond the reach of students. They found it difficult to tame this object which is not the latest. "
The NumWorks calculator has several advantages. The company places special emphasis on the integration of the Python language, which is part of the second project since the 2018 academic year. "We are the first to provide a calculator that allows programming in Python," Romain Goyet (Casio and TI later agreed). Franck Duffaud also told us that the NumWorks calculator allows "to create nested sequences, and other sequences do not." The application is regularly updated approximately every 2 months so that new features can be integrated or existing features can be improved.
For the purchase of a graphing calculator, it costs 80 Euros (or 30 Euros more than the two reference calculators Casio and TI mentioned at the beginning of this article). The mobile application is free and is available for iOS and Android. "The app contains all the functions of a physical calculator," Romain Goyet continued. Therefore, we can expect that the application will be a huge success because it provides a free scientific calculator, and the sales of physical packaging boxes will not follow this trend. But this is not the case. For the creators of NumWorks, the two elements of cell phone jammer are complementary.