My students know that I have strongly negative feelings about Casio calculators. My distrust of calculators started when I was at school and struggled to get them to interpret my inputs as I intended.
When I started teaching, many students in Years 10-13 were still using the older Casio fx-85ES, which they had been bought when they joined the school in Year 7, but some had the newer Casio fx-85GT PLUS. I do not know why Casio has so effectively cornered the calculator market in UK schools, but it is very rare that a different make of calculator will be seen, and usually alternatives are just cheaper clones of the Casios. I discovered that two students could type exactly the same key presses into their calculators and get different results, despite both calculators being different iterations of the same model (Casio fx-85).
Each new iteration of the Casio fx-85 has had small changes made, but the latest iteration (the Casio fx-85GT CW) has by far the most changes between versions. A few changes are for the better, but most are definitely for the worse. The worst sin is Casio moving the input logic from the 10^ button (the inverse log button) to the ×10^ button (the standard form button) and removing the inverse log button altogether! Now, once again, the same key presses typed into consecutive iterations yields significantly different results.
Certain issues haven’t been improved, such as the teeny tiny recurring dot. The user interface now requires far more key presses to navigate and operate. And a second terrible sin Casio has committed is moving almost every function so that muscle memory must be retrained.
I recorded a short video weblog post, which I’ve embedded below, so you can see some of the issues for yourself. Yes, there are a few improvements, but overall the world is a little bit worse for having the latest iteration of Casio fx-85 in it.
Physics with Keith 