Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators?

New submitter Covalent writes "I'm a science teacher and have, over the years, accumulated a number of lost graphing calculators (mostly TI-83s). After trying to locate the owners, I have given up and have been loaning them out to students as needed. I want to something more nerd-worthy with them, though. I would feel wrong for selling them. What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"

Re:Doing the right thing

[oPless]

Mod parent up. You *are* doing the "right thing"(tm)

Your duty is clear:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

CALCnet [cemetech.net] allows networking of TI-83 and similar calculators with relatively simple external hardware.

With that detail out of the way, you are free to implement a display-wall and/or the most powerful z80 cluster computer in the known universe.

Extra credit, of course, will be awarded if you succeed in writing an xorg driver that can treat an MxN array of networked calculators as a greyscale display of appropriate resolution.

Re:Doing the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You're loaning them to the needy. Doing good can be nerdy too.

Now we know where the calculators go: is this not the very definition of calculator heaven?

Keep on keepin' on

[Amorymeltzer]

Please keep doing what you're doing. I had my graphing calculator stolen in high school, and was not happy about having to shell out the cash for a new one. I had a test later that day that required one, so I went to the head of the department and she reached into a box marked "graduated" and pulled one out. She put every found calculator that came her way into a box labelled with that year. Four years later she moved it into the graduated box, understanding that the student had since left and would not be claiming their lost property. She simply handed me one and said not to worry about it. A decade later I still use it.

Re:Keep loaning them out.

[Verdatum]

Please tell me where to get a TI-83 for $50 at a brick and mortar establishment. It is the only bit of technology I know that has been able to maintain it's $100 price tag for twenty years. This is one of the stupidest bits of price controlling ever perpetrated.

Loan them to nerds-to-be

[Sarten-X]

A story I've kept for years as inspiration. A hundred points to anyone who can find the source:

One of the best parts of high school was when my math teacher took a spare TI-83 and let me use it exclusively for the whole semester, under specific terms: Do something awesome with it, and he'd let me skip my final.

Three weeks later, I'd written a small text adventure. A few weeks after that, I had a trading game with a complex market. By the end of the year, I had turned that same trading game into a graphical one, where the goal was to sail around the world buying low and selling high. The more money you had, the more likely you were to be attacked, which also took place in stunning 1-bit color graphics. The game's actions were controlled through a menu system, which was also used to launch the game (as opposed to the various tools I'd written to do my homework for me).

He was impressed, and I was inspired. When I started applying to colleges, I finally knew what major I wanted: computer science.

Keep loaning out those calculators. A student might need one, and not even realize it.

Re:Keep loaning them out.

[AwesomeMcgee]

You missed the part where all the text books are written to the TI-83 (pictures of the buttons to press in order and all), that kid is going to be the slowest in his class if he's using your Casio while everyone is going to think he's some kind of dummy. Don't you know the most important part of school these days: conformity! He'll clearly get an F now.

Re:Mod parent insightful

[evil_aaronm]

In some school districts, it's hard to know what's "right." My last day as a sub for my local district, some 6th grader took a swipe at me from behind so I walked him down to the principal's office and told him how lucky he was that I wasn't going to press charges right then. Momma came down a little later and discussed the incident with the principal, who then called me down to the office as well. The discussion wasn't about her son's behavior: I got reprimanded for "shoving" the little turd down the hall. It's true that when I got out of my chair, after the swipe, I moved him toward the door, but it wasn't like I knocked him down. I've coach wrestling for years and that little shit was lucky I didn't rip his head off in stride.

Did I mention it was my last day there as a sub? They didn't fire me; I took my name off their list.

Re:Give them away

[RealGene]

TI holds a monopoly thanks to their sole approval with Educational Testing Service for use on the ACT and SAT exams.
Any calculator would be fine, TI and ETS would have you believe that anything else would be a cheating device.
That's why they go to such ridiculous lengths to make them difficult to hack (encrypted loaders, secret keys, etc).

round up some cables and robotics geeks

[hAckz0r]

You will be suprised what a few young engineers can come up with a few toys at their disposal. You can connect a TI calculator to just about anything to control or monitor it.

http://hackaday.com/tag/ti-83/ [hackaday.com]
http://www.ticalc.org/basics/calculators/index.html [ticalc.org]
http://www.ticalc.org/hardware/cables/serial.html [ticalc.org]
http://education.ti.com/guidebooks/sdk/83p/sdk83pguide.pdf [ti.com]
http://sami.ticalc.org/irlink/e_hard.htm [ticalc.org]
http://smallrobot.bizland.com/Instructions.pdf [bizland.com]
http://www.mathinscience.info/public/mathbots_challenge/mathbot_chall_lesson.htm [mathinscience.info]
http://www.razorrobotics.com/knowledge/?title=TI_Connect [razorrobotics.com]
http://www.free-scientific-calculator.com/texas-instruments-graph-link-connectivity-kit/ [free-scien...ulator.com]
http://blog.makezine.com/2006/02/19/how-to-connect-a-ti83-to/ [makezine.com]