# Calculators

Personally, I feel that student’s reliance on calculators has adversely affected their ability to perform mental arithmetic calculations, or at the very least, their willingness to actually do calculations themselves. I often see students in my KS3 top sets do things like $$8 \times 4$$ on a calculator, and when I question them, they explain that they “just want to be sure”. A Level students routinely use calculators for simple arithmetic (and for calculating the standard trig ratios) with the justification that “only in C1 can we not use a calculator, so why wouldn’t we?”. Stephen Cavadino (@srcav) has also written along these lines here. I personally fell that, especially at A Level, calculators are not used effectively. They seem to be used purely to do relatively trivial calculations, instead of being used to explore other areas of mathematics, that couldn’t as easily be explored without calculators. In fact as it stands, the A Level mathematics qualifications don’t really reflect the way in which technology is used for mathematics – I am anticipating this to change somewhat with the new specification, and MEI’s Further Pure Mathematics with Technology module is an excellent example of how technology could be used at the KS5 level to inspire future mathematicians.