I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It's about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it's worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I'm probably biased because I wrote it :)
Ok so you're saying it never happened, but then in the very next sentence you acknowledge that you know it is happening with TI today, and then also admit you know that it did happen with some other brands in the past?
But, if you had read the linked post before writing numerous comments about it, you'd see that it documents that the ambiguity actually exists among both old and currently shipping models from TI, HP, Casio, and Canon, today, and that both behaviors are intentional and documented.
There is no bug; none of these calculators is "wrong".
Ok, this is the funniest thing I've read so far today, but if this is what you are teaching high school students it is also rather sad because you are doing them a disservice by teaching them that there is no ambiguity where there actually is.
If OP's blog post is too long for you (it is quite long) i recommend reading this one instead: The PEMDAS Paradox.
By "we" do you mean high school teachers, or Australian society beyond high school? Because, I'm pretty sure the latter isn't true, and I'm skeptical of the former. I thought generally the ÷ symbol mostly stops being used (except as a calculator button) even before high school, basically as soon as fractions are taught. Do you have textbooks where the fraction bar is used concurrently with the obelus (÷) division symbol?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
never happened
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You asked me what I do if my students show me 2 different answers what do I tell them, and I told you that has never happened. None of my students have ever had one of the calculators which does it wrong.
Correct. I already noted earlier (maybe with someone else) that the TI calculator manual says that they obey the Primary School order of operations, which doesn't work with High School order of operations. i.e. when the brackets have a coefficient. The TI calculator will give a correct answer for 6/(1+2) and 6/2x(1+2), but gives a wrong answer for 6/2(1+2), and it's in their manual why. I saw one Youtuber who was showing the manual scroll right past it! It was right there on screen why it does it wrong and she just scrolled down from there without even looking at it!
Any calculator which fails to obey The Distributive Law is wrong. It is disobeying a rule of Maths.
There actually isn't. We use decimal points (not commas like some European countries), the obelus (not colon like some European countries), etc., so no, there is never any ambiguity. And the expression in question here follows those same notations (it has an obelus, not a colon), so still no ambiguity.
Yes, I've read that one before. Makes the exact same mistakes. Claims it's ambiguous while at the same time completely ignoring The Distributive Law and Terms. I'll even point out a specific thing (of many) where they miss the point...
ab=(axb) by definition. It's in Cajori, it's in today's Maths textbooks. So a(b) isn't interchangeable with axb, it's only interchangeable with (axb) (or (ab) or ab). That's one of the most common mistakes I see. You can't remove brackets if there's still more than 1 term left inside, but many people do and end up with a wrong answer.
I said "In Australia" (not in Australian high school), so I mean all of Australia.
Definitely is. I have never seen anyone here ever use a colon to mean divide. It's only ever used for a ratio.
All my textbooks use both. Did you read my thread? If you use a fraction bar then that is a single term. If you use an obelus (or colon if you're in a country which uses colon for division) then that is 2 terms. I covered all of that in my thread.
EDITED TO ADD: If you don't use both then how do you write to divide by a fraction?