Townsend Harris High School students enrolled in Algebra I and Geometry classes are switching to the NumWorks graphing calculator. The change comes after Assistant Principal of STEM Abid Choudhury and math teacher Kayla Gill attended the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Atlanta, Georgia, where they learned how to integrate the device into classroom instruction.
“Attending the conference gave me the confidence to not only use it but also make sure my students have access to it,” Ms. Gill said.
NumWorks calculators are offered for $90 at the school store and are approved for the SAT, ACT, and Regents exams. Students can also access a free downloadable emulator online on app stores or the NumWorks website.
After receiving a class set of calculators, Ms. Gill noticed an immediate difference in her Algebra I classes. “It takes a lot less time to do questions on the NumWorks calculator,” she said.
Ms. Gill said that on other models, students often had to manually change values to find certain points on a graph. In a NumWorks calculator, Ms. Gill said students can “hover over different parts of the graph, and the calculator labels key features such as x-intercept, y-intercept, maximum, and minimum.”
For students selecting calculators, freshman Maliakah Abdus-Sabr said she chose NumWorks over the TI-84, a common choice before Numworks was made available to students, because “the screen is clearer, the menus are easy to understand and navigate to, and everything runs faster.”
Mr. Choudhury cited accessibility as the most important factor for switching to NumWorks. “This isn’t really [pitting] one brand over the other, but the reality is with the existing TI-84, there are a lot of keystrokes you have to use,” he said.
“Getting it from THHS was a very simple process,” Maliakah said, noting that she received the calculator immediately after purchase.
Other students shared similar experiences. Freshman Jaylee Bangaroo said, “The buttons make sense, and it feels more modern than other calculators.”
Junior Ivan Chen, who switched to NumWorks, described tasks such as regression, matrices, and graph analysis as “very tedious” on the TI-84. “The NumWorks, on the other hand, is very straightforward, as most functions have a designated app,” said Ivan.
However, sophomore Maggie Gildea said she has not encountered any major difficulties using a TI-84, adding that purchasing a new calculator can be costly for students who already own one.
Likewise, sophomore Siddhinni Singh said that her TI-84 is “very fast and useful…because in some of the cheaper calculators, you can’t do certain things you need for subjects like Algebra 2.”
