Calculator Policy

Key Stage 3

We recommend that all our students are equipped with calculators for all their maths lessons. Students will need a scientific calculator such as the Casio fx-83ES.  This calculator has 249 functions, comes in a hard case and runs on a AAA battery.  This calculator will be powerful enough for a pupil to use up to A-Level.

At the beginning of a new school year we are able to make a bulk purchase of calculators for year 7 and any other student who has misplaced their calculator. These were £6 this year.

The role of the calculator:

Calculator skills need to be taught as poor calculator skills can hinder pupils.

The skills that students need to develop are:

• selecting from the display the number of figures appropriate to the context of a calculation
• knowing the order in which to use the keys when there is more than one step
• using the memory, bracket, square, square root and cube root, sign change and fraction keys
• being able to understand a display in standard index form.

The use of the percentage key is discouraged.

Key Stage 4

The calculator described above is more than capable of performing at GCSE.  If you don't possess this calculator then a calculator should have, as a minimum, the following functions:

+, -, x, ÷, x², memory, (, ), xy, x1/y, standard form, sine, cosine, tangent and their inverses.

The following calculators are not permitted in the GCSE examination:

Texas TI-89, TI-92, Casio cfx-9970G, C-300, Hewlett Packard HP 48G.

There are certainly others which are not permitted and these have the following facilities:

Databanks; retrieval of text or formulae; QWERTY keyboards; built-in symbolic algebra manipulations; symbolic differentiation or integration.

Students will be expected to have access to a suitable electronic calculator for the calculator paper.The ability to calculate mentally lies at the heart of much of Mathematics. A student must think ‘can I do this in my head?’ before they select any other calculation method: written or using a calculator.

To access an online scientific calculator then click here. Give it a few seconds to upload.