Re: A86: TI-Speaker


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Re: A86: TI-Speaker



In our high school, whether or not you use your own calculator or school calculator, you are required to sign a contract thing saying "I will only use my calculator for school purposes, and will not play games on it," or something to that effect. In middle school we played calcs all the time and they didn't care much.
____________________________
Brent Schneider
brentes@vvm.com
http://www.vvm.com/~brentes/
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
   -Popular Mechanics, 1949
----- Original Message -----
From: David Phillips
To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 5:16 AM
Subject: Re: A86: TI-Speaker


> the GPA consequences if I'm wrong.  And I don't see how
> sleeping or playing games is disrespectful to the students, and
> I owe no teacher more respect than they've earned.  (If they take
> offence by my indication that their lecture is boring and not
> benificial to me, perhaps they should revise the lecture, or, if
> they can't, just not take personal offence.)  The last time I
> needed to pay attention in an English class was sixth grade,
> just as I finished learning everything in the subject I was taught
> by an institution of learning.  And here I am doomed to take
> more English courses in my life even after writing this perfectly
> good 200 word rant.

I agree with you about English classes.  The one I took last semester,
English 102 (which I'll be retaking...), basically involved reading a bunch
of photocopied magazine articles (which you had to pay $20 for) about
pointless social issues (things like makeup, face lifts, etc.), discussing
these in class and writing papers about them.  About the middle of the
semester, one of my returned papers had a note to talk to the instructor
after class.  He said that he could tell from the papers that I didn't
really care about the course material and wasn't putting any effort into the
papers (I suppose spending 4+ hours and ending up writing a crappy paper
about crappy material is not effort).  I told him pretty much and
subsequently dropped the class.  I hate having to take core classes.  This
is one reason why taking the English AP test in high school would have been
a much better use of my time than spending hours a day writing a game for a
calculator...

I somewhat agree with you on with giving a teacher the respect he/she has
earned.  Being forced to attend class in high school puts you in a weird
position.  There were some teachers I really liked, and had a lot of respect
for, but would lecture all hour and put me to sleep.  This obviously gives
them the message that you don't care about the class or what they are
talking about.  A college course is different.  Whether or not it is
required for your major, you are still choosing to go, and if you go and
sleep or blatently don't pay attention, I think it is not showing respect
for the instructor, the same as it is in high school.  Personally, if I were
an instructor, I wouldn't care if people slept or messed around, some people
just aren't going to care no matter how interesting you are, but it would
make me wonder why they showed up everyday.

Though, one thing that got me in high school, is that people could doodle or
whatever during math and that is fine, but playing tetris on my calculator
is bad?  If another student can pay attention while drawing on a piece of
paper, is me being able to pay attention while mindlessly pushing a couple
of buttons on a calculator such a foreign concept?  I don't know if anyone
else has this problem, but if I am sitting in a class and not doing
anything, I _always_ fall asleep after about 10-20 minutes.  Something
mindless like drawing (which I don't do, I'm not artistic in the slightest)
or playing on a calculator keeps me from falling asleep.  High school
teachers never seemed to understand that.

> So as to avoid risk of being called off-topic, what are some
> solutions you all have come up with to gaming in schools?
> There was the one-hand trick in the old days, and all the
> fake mem reset programs floating around.  What about new
> advances in on-calc programming (always a good topic)?

Since I am paying for class now, I go, pay attention and take notes (and on
rare occasion ask or answer a question).  If I was going to play games, I'd
stay at my apartment and play Quake 3.  The only class in high school for me
where I remember having a big problem with playing games or falling asleep
was my Algebrea II Honors class, sophomore year.  I had a TI-82, and this
was before assembly on it, but there was always plenty of programming or
basic games to mess with.  Any time it looked like you were messing with
your calculator (I once tried taking notes on it) the teacher would yell at
you.  Being me, I ended up just falling asleep a lot, and was told once that
if I fell asleep again I would get a detention.  I had to clean a lot of
overhead sheets that day after school...

Fake memory programs were never an issue for me, at least with teachers.  I
never had a teacher check a calculator's memory, except one time in Algebra
II after a test the teacher checked everyone's equation lists to make sure
they were clear (didn't want anyone copying test material) as they walked
out the door.  One thing I did find useful on the 86, completely by
accident, is that if you set the flag for small text to write to the graph
screen, every menu on the calculator then appears empty.  My friends who had
86's (most bought them due to my recommendation) loved this as well.  An 8
byte asm program that keeps those annoying people away who would endlessly
pester you for your calc to play games was nice to have around.

On calc programming is an interesting subject, but assembly program source
usually is very large, and editing with a small calc keyboard is tough.  On
the 86 it is now possible, though it wasn't out when I was in high school.
For calculators with flash rom, especially the 89 and 92+, this could be
useful.  The 92+ could prove to be nice to program on, but I would much
rather just use a laptop.



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