Education Week - June 14, 2017 - 18

Mathematics

By Liana Loewus

Math-Market Battle:
Graphing Calculators

THERE ARE COUNTLESS EXAMPLES OF WEB-BASED TOOLS CHALLENGING
the need for hardware devices: VCRs, CD players, and fax
machines-all once commonplace-have been relegated to
the backs of many closets and garage sale piles.
The same potential threat is now facing a device once considered indispensable to secondary math teachers: the handheld graphing calculator.
One company in particular is upending the market: Desmos, a San Francisco-based startup, has created a webbased calculator that works across devices and browsers
and, perhaps most enticingly, is free for teachers and
students. That means schools and parents are starting to
think twice before paying between $60 and $175 for the
hand-held calculators that have long been a staple in algebra classes.
Proponents of hand-held calculators quickly counter
that web-based tools are far from cost-free: In addition to
purchasing hardware, such as tablets and laptops, schools
need to pay for information-technology support and reliable broadband to use those tools.
Recently, the Smarter Balanced testing group announced
that it was embedding the Desmos calculator into its online
math assessments-a move that Desmos officials say other
major testing companies are considering as well. "The old
hand-held devices are sort of entrenched because they've
been institutionalized in standardized testing and curriculum in a very serious way," said Doug Ensley, deputy executive director at the Mathematical Association of America.
"What Desmos is doing is loosening that grip."
For now, that grip seems sturdy: Hand-held calculators still have quite a heavy presence in secondary math
classrooms. And many teachers say that until the college-entrance exams, mainly the SAT and ACT, make
the switch to online calculators, there's no getting away
from practicing with the hand-helds in class.
Desmos has openly made Texas Instruments, the company that's dominated the K-12 graphing calculator market
for nearly 30 years, the target of its disruption efforts.
"It was amazing technology when it came out," Eli Luberoff, the CEO of Desmos, said of the TI80 calculators, which
debuted in 1990. "My beef is it just hasn't improved in cost
or quality or usability since."

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Education Week / June 14, 2017

But according to Texas Instruments, the simplicity of
the hand-held calculators is part of what makes them
a good choice for schools. "We only focus on the pieces
students need in classrooms," said Peter Balyta, the
president of Texas Instruments Education Technology.
"We do that without the many distractions and testsecurity concerns that come with a smartphone or tablet
and the internet."
More than 90 percent of high school students using
graphing calculators are still using hand-held versions,
according to third-party research conducted for Texas Instruments, and that hasn't changed in the past four years.
According to Balyta, Texas Instruments adds 5 million
graphing-calculator users a year. Graphing calculators are
a relatively small portfolio item for the Fortune 500 company, which has 30,000 employees and posted $13.37 billion
in revenue last year.
Desmos won't release exact numbers, but Luberoff says it
has "millions of active users every month."

BUT THE SMALL, YOUNG TEAM AT DESMOS IS BETTING TEACHERS AND
students aren't wedded to those hand-held graphing tools.
Luberoff conceived of what would become Desmos as an
undergraduate at Yale University a decade ago. He was tutoring math students in nearby Westport, Conn., and realized "they were still using this outdated technology that I
used and that astonishingly they're still using today-the
TI84," he said. "I decided to see what browsers could bring
to this situation."
He took a year off from school to work on the software,
then returned to major in math and physics in 2009. Two
years later, the startup received an $800,000 investment
from Mitch Kapor, an entrepreneur who invests in tech
startups aimed at narrowing gaps in access for disadvantaged groups.
Luberoff now has a team of 17 designers, coders, and
math educators on staff, including Dan Meyer, who became a star in the math education world after his 2010 TED
Talk "Math Class Needs a Makeover" went viral. The group
also has 80 teacher "fellows," who are selected through a
competitive application process and flown to the Desmos
Education Week - June 14, 2017

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