[knaik94]

I appreciate your perspective. My experience teaching comes from tutoring accelerated high school students in a 1 on 1 environment at home or at the library, and I have been doing that for some 8+ years. Very few of my students need me to ask them to refocus. I can count on my hands the number of times I have had to address cellphone usage while teaching. In most situations my cell phone is being used as a ti89 using an emulator. Even when I know my student doesn't pay attention in school, they pay attention to me teaching the same topic. They pay attention even while sitting among friends in a library and they don't talk during exercises. My laptop is always open so I can quickly pull up some resources while teaching.

Maybe the difference between a typical classroom and my tutoring sessions is a student feels some sort of intrinsic motivation to be there and pay attention. Once the student has an understanding in the value of paying attention and actively chooses to pay attention, they are naturally able to have self control.

I appreciate you pushing calculator literacy. My school district is old school in both technology and methods. I know teachers that actively encourage using a ti84 over 89, so most people don't touch a real CAS. My go to party trick is still the solve() fuction. We have a very strong CS program, we have honors weighted classes in data structures, mobile development, and game development which has AP CS as a prereq. We also have AP weight classes for Multivar Calc, Linear Algebra and DifEQ which all come after AP Calc BC. The students are smart but the calculator literacy is just not there.

I think Excel literacy is the perfect bridge for getting students to start using database logic without a database. Index/match or vlookup are just constrained database queries. Once a student is able to connect their calculator CAS knowledge to excel, there are very few excel sheets they will come across that they won't understand. We have basic excel literacy because most AP science teachers expect typed lab reports, the exception is chem lab notebooks, there's usually one lab where there's some stat analysis and every lab requires some sort of graph. To me excel is the next logical step after mastering a calculator CAS.

Desmos is such a great tool, I haven't played with this specific feature too much but I am so impressed by the animation feature. https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/6062093999...

[mlyle]

> My experience teaching comes from tutoring accelerated high school students in a 1 on 1 environment at home or at the library, and I have been doing that for some 8+ years.

Oh, sure, I never have problems with students using devices one on one, either. With a motivated student, social pressure from authority is completely on the teacher's side in such a situation.

If there's 18 students in the room, though... the chance of getting caught is lower. The student may have seen someone else just check a message in front of them before, normalizing the behavior. And the student may feel that they don't personally need to hear the second, alternate explanation the instructor is offering, and can check just for a second. (The big problem is the "just for a second" almost never is).

Re: calculators: lots of students are now using TI nSpire CAS or HP Prime (the latter is way better).

We have a fair bit of CS sequence beyond APCSA/APCSP, too. I'm not really teaching CS, though; I tend to take on bizarre, wildly-out-of-level things for the electives I teach-- teaching middle school students basics of controls or computer architecture or analysis of analog circuits, and high school students stuff that's usually graduate level material. All paced slower, and without telling them what they're doing is supposed to be hard. ;)

> Desmos is such a great tool, I haven't played with this specific feature too much but I am so impressed by the animation feature.

I love Desmos. I like the animate feature, but the regressions tool was the one I learned the most from. There's something magical about being able to see how much an outlier point is affecting the line of best fit by changing it on the fly and seeing the line/curve instantly update (which offers a degree of intuition beyond what you get from squinting at residuals).