Wright is a graduate of Vanderbilt University's Owen School of Management with an MBA in finance. He has worked for Accenture designing financial systems, for a hospital management company designing a flexible budgeting system, for an actuary designing pension termination and defined contribution systems for a large insurance company as an internal consultant to senior management. Wright also is an instructor for HP Calculator's Virtual Classrooms.
Is the calculator still an important tool for business students?
Certainly. Students need to be able to use calculators. There's no way they can keep up in my classes if they do it by hand.
Could you describe how the calculator makes working on problems easier in a classroom?
I sometimes have a student who holds up his or her hand and says, "I did it the way you said and I came up with a different answer." Rather than go look over his shoulder I have him repeat the process and say out loud what he's doing. We can then discover pretty quickly where he went wrong, and it's usually something simple like forgetting a step or not setting up the problem or calculator correctly. So, I have found that the most important thing when you start out working on a new problem is to make sure the machine is in a known state. For example, when doing loan problems is the calculator set to begin or end mode? Was the calculator cleared properly between calculations in order to delete numbers that may still be hanging around in the registers? Of course, it is rather humorous that when a student says they can't get the answer, they often magically get the correct answer when I come over to watch. I've been accused of having an aura that affects the results, but I think it's just that they pay more attention to what they are doing when I'm nearby.
Don't most students already know how to use a calculator?
They come in from high school having used graphing calculators. They can get by with a scientific calculator, but it takes a lot of work. A dedicated business calculator is optimized to do the math most business people need on a constant basis and is a much better choice for a business major.
Do you require your students to have a business calculator?
Yes. I tell them that they can buy a good business calculator in the $30 range that will do what they need. It's really not that big of an investment when some textbooks are selling for $100. The HP 10bII is a very affordable and powerful calculator. More serious students may want an HP 12c or 12c Platinum and I really like the HP 17bII+. These are tools the student can take with them through school, licensing exams and into their professional lives - they won't outgrow them.
What do you do when a student seems to be having a lot of trouble with the math?
I tell students who may be intimidated by the math that it's really not that complicated. Some students arrive just terrified by numbers. I tell them to relax and that they will figure it out. There are a few basic steps to go through with any problem and the math isn't as complicated as they expect at first. And, if they learn those concepts on a calculator, it's easy to transfer those skills to a spreadsheet or any other tool.
Do you have some pointers about how teachers can be successful at using the calculator in the classroom?
I find that the main thing that teachers can do is to really know how to use the calculator and not just read steps out of the book. That takes some of the teacher's time, but it really helps the students when they run into problems during class. Being familiar with the calculator makes it easier to properly teach its use in solving business problems.
I highly recommend that professors look at the free tutorials and other support that HP provides on its calculator Web site for both financial and scientific calculators - and point their students to these resources as well. HP also has virtual classroom and computer-based training available, so there is help available to anyone looking for it.
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