[camdat]

If someone plugs math into a calculator, are they really learning something when it spits out an answer?

Of course! How to apply the calculator to problems, and how to discern if a problem is calculator-solveable. We've decided as a society it's better for students to use calculators as a tool in mathematics, why is chatGPT different in literature?

[tjr]

I don't know how calculators are used in classrooms today, but when I was going through school, the general idea was that we could use calculators to do tasks that we had already learned to do.

E.g., we could not use a calculator at all when learning arithmetic.

Once we learned arithmetic and were learning (say) algebra, we could use the calculator to do arithmetic, but not to compute the algebra for us.

While learning trigonometry, we could use the calculator for arithmetic, but not for computing sines and cosines.

While learning calculus, we could use the calculator for arithmetic and sines and cosines, but we could not use it to perform integration or differentiation for us.

And so on.

[nerdbert]

You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

You have to understand the problem and how to use the tool.

If one's understanding of how to use the tool is limited to "access the tool and dump in the question, then blindly paste the response into my homework document", I'd say you are not learning much. It's obvious that every contemporary teenager can learn that in a few minutes. That's not giving us the capabilities to move forward as a society.

[flangola7]

> You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

But we can? Students using ChatGPT to get homework answers is the whole thing we are talking about.