![]() ![]() ![]() Two years later, the startup received more than $800,000 investment from Mitch Kapor, an entrepreneur who invests in tech startups aimed at narrowing gaps in access for disadvantaged groups, and several other investment groups. He took a year off from school to work on the software, then returned to major in math and physics in 2009. “I decided to see what browsers could bring to this situation.” He was tutoring math students in nearby Westport, Conn., and realized “they were still using this outdated technology that I used and that astonishingly they’re still using today-the TI84,” he said. Luberoff conceived of what would become Desmos as an undergraduate at Yale University a decade ago. ![]() ĭesmos won’t release exact numbers, but Luberoff says it has “millions of active users every month.”īut the small, young team at Desmos is betting teachers and students aren’t wedded to those hand-held graphing tools. Graphing calculators are a relatively small portfolio item for the Fortune 500 company, which has 30,000 employees and posted $13.37 billion in revenue last year. More than 90 percent of high school students using graphing calculators are still using hand-held versions, according to third-party research conducted for Texas Instruments, and that hasn’t changed in the past four years.Īccording to Balyta, Texas Instruments adds 5 million graphing-calculator users a year. “We do that without the many distractions and test-security concerns that come with a smartphone or tablet and the internet.” “We only focus on the pieces students need in classrooms,” said Peter Balyta, the president of Texas Instruments Education Technology. “My beef is it just hasn’t improved in cost or quality or usability since.”īut according to Texas Instruments, the simplicity of the hand-held calculators is part of what makes them a good choice for schools. “It was amazing technology when it came out,” Eli Luberoff, the CEO of Desmos, said of the TI80 calculators, which debuted in 1990. And many teachers say that until the college-entrance exams, mainly the SAT and ACT, make the switch to online calculators, there’s no getting away from practicing with the hand-helds in class.ĭesmos has openly made Texas Instruments, the company that’s dominated the K-12 graphing calculator market for nearly 30 years, the target of its disruption efforts. “What Desmos is doing is loosening that grip.”įor now, that grip seems sturdy: Hand-held calculators still have quite a heavy presence in secondary math classrooms. “The old hand-held devices are sort of entrenched because they’ve been institutionalized in standardized testing and curriculum in a very serious way,” said Doug Ensley, deputy executive director at the Mathematical Association of America. Recently, the Smarter Balanced testing group announced that it was embedding the Desmos calculator into its online math assessments-a move that Desmos officials say other major testing companies are considering as well. Proponents of hand-held calculators quickly counter that web-based tools are far from cost-free: In addition to purchasing hardware, such as tablets and laptops, schools need to pay for information-technology support and reliable broadband to use those tools. ![]()
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