For students who are learning, perhaps this is what they need. What they don't need to to be given answers to everything on a plate without having to work at all.
We all know that skills unpractised are skills lost. You need to work continually and constantly on skills to keep them honed, and you need to work hard to gain new skills.
Clearly this calculator isn't suitable for every context, but neither is Python, C++, Haskell or Lisp. (Well, except for Lisp. We all know that's useful in every context. 8-)
Would you want to use a computer language that only gives the answer (of a numeric integral or the number of registered users) after you give a suitable estimate?
The problem is that this is a tool that an author designed for another people to use. There is an essay from pg that says that the good languages are designed by the authors for themselves, but I can't find the link. The same idea applies to the other tools.
I'm teaching elementary calculus and linear algebra in the university, and I think that it is very important that the students get a general idea of what they are doing. (For example: The integral from 0 to 1 of e^-x is less than 1, because the area is inside a 1x1 square. If a linear equation system includes x+y+z=1000 and each variable is positive, then x=2117 is not a good answer) But an annoying tool is not the answer to this problem.
This may surprise you, but I never use the results of a computation without first estimating what the answer should be, estimating the errors in that estimation, and having some alternative ways of deciding how accurate the calculation is. Of course, I do work in safety critical application.
But I also deal with students, and constantly, constantly struggle against their willingness to accept just any old number simply because it came from a calculator, a program, a newspaper, or wikipedia. Recently a colleague recounted how a student had been doing some work and had come up with a result. When asked "How accurate is this?" the student clearly just didn't understand the question, let alone have a clue how to answer it.
There is no single solution, there is no single way to make the lazy work harder, there is no single tool that will solve all the problems that exist in education as a whole.
But having a collection of tools, a collection of techniques, and a collection of approaches has to be a good thing.
> We all know that skills unpractised are skills lost.
We also know that skills unused are skills unpractised. I don't know how useful keeping up with my handwriting is, for example, I haven't done it in about ten years.
We all know that skills unpractised are skills lost. You need to work continually and constantly on skills to keep them honed, and you need to work hard to gain new skills.
Clearly this calculator isn't suitable for every context, but neither is Python, C++, Haskell or Lisp. (Well, except for Lisp. We all know that's useful in every context. 8-)