mechanical digital calculator
calculator Use in education
A student with a calculator.
In most developed countries, students use calculators for schoolwork. There was initially some opposition from the concept due to concerns that basic arithmetic skills would suffer. There remains disagreement about the importance of having the ability to work with your hands and "in the head," with some curricula restricting calculator usage until a certain amount of proficiency is achieved and others focusing upon teaching estimation techniques and solving problems.
There are other reasons to be concerned, such as students may utilize the calculator in a way that is not correct but trust the result since that was the result given to the calculator. Teachers attempt to address this by urging the student to make an estimate of the results manually, and then ensuring that it's in general agreement with it. calculatedresult. Also, it is possible for a child to type in the formula -1 x 1 and get the correct result, 1, without realizing the principle involved. In this sense, the calculator can become a tool for a child rather than a learning tool, and it can slow down students at exams when they examine even the most minor of numbers on an calculator.
Other issues related to the use
Errors aren't limited to schoolchildren. Anyone who uses a calculator can blindly use the calculator's results without double-checking the size of the result--i.e. which decimal points are located. This problem was all but nonexistent in the era of slide rules and pencil-and-paper calculations. The task of establishing the magnitudes of results had to be handled on the part of the person using the calculator.
Some fractions such as 2/3 can be difficult to display on a calculator display since they are usually rounded to 0.66666667. Furthermore, certain fractions, such as 0.14285714... could be difficult to recognize when they are in decimal form. In actual this number is 1/7. Certain of the more sophisticated scientific calculators can use vulgar fractions but the way to do it is awkward.Basic calculator
Calculators vs. computing
A fundamental difference between calculators and the majority of computers is that calculators use only numbers however computers can make use of numbers to directly manipulate words, images, or sounds, for example.
It is true that the market of calculators is very price-sensitive. most of the time, users are concerned about what is the least costly model with a certain features set. However, the user does not worry about speed (since speed is primarily constrained by the speed at which the user presses the controls). So, designers of calculators aim to reduce the amount of logic components in the chip, and not the number of clock cycles required to complete a computation.
For instance, in lieu of an actual multiplier in hardware for example, a calculator might implement floating point math using code stored in ROMand calculate trigonometric operations using the CORDIC algorithm because CORDIC doesn't require floating-point. In the same way, bit-serial logic designs are more prevalent in calculators however bit-parallel designs dominate general-purpose computers. A bit-serial design reduces the complexity of the chip however it takes a larger number of clock cycles.
Personal computers as well as personal digital assistants can perform general calculations in many ways:
- Many applications are designed to carry out calculations, ranging from basic calculator emulators, to sophisticated calculators such as Microsoft Calculator, to advanced spreadsheet applications such as Excel as well as OpenOffice.org Calc.
- Computer algebra programs , such as Mathematica, Maple, or Matlab can perform complicated calculations.
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Client-side scripting is a method of using to calculate, e.g. by entering "
javascript:alert(calculation written in Javascript)
" in a web browser's address bar (as opposed to "http://website name
"). Such calculations can be embedded into a separate Javascript file or HTML file too. - Online calculators such as those that use the calculator feature of Google's Google search engine may perform calculations server-side.
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