International Baccalaureate math has some stats questions that require a calculator that can do stats questions. Not really possible by hand in exam conditions!

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chongli 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My Casio FX-260 Solar IIs [1][2] (I recently bought 3 more of them) cost me $5 CAD a piece on clearance at Walmart. No battery, a modern solar panel that works great even in dimly lit rooms, and a modern SOC with all the standard scientific calculations, scientific notation, engineering notation, significant figures, and all the basic stats calculations too (sum, mean, pop stddev, sample stddev, permutations, combinations, factorials).

It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.

[1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...

[2] https://www.casio.com/ca-en/scientific-calculators/product.F...

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kristopolous 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The basic $12 Casio scientific has stats like mean, standard deviation, regression... Stats is a huge field, we're talking highschool level. I think it probably covers it

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nextos 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

IB questions require at least a mid-range calculator to obtain e.g. the ccdf of chisq, t, and other distributions.

In the exam, you'd also be at a disadvantage without advanced graphing.

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varun_ch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh that’s neat! Probably should’ve checked your link. Not sure what the advantage of the Ti-84 would be for highschool math, but the UX on NumWorks calculators is completely a game changer, especially with stats and graphing questions.

Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.

	▲	kristopolous 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean sure. Unlimited precision calculation I don't think is the proper domain of the cheap desk calculator. I mean what do these do? I think like 10 digits worth? If you're actually doing something requiring over 10 digits of accuracy and you can reliably hit that you probably have a $10 million lab... So honestly what are we talking about here...If it's pure mathematics this is a bad tool for that as well.

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nxobject 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

HL or SL? (It's been a while for me, but I know I needed PDF/CDF functions... and I don't know about the optional modules/Further.)