App Aims: Mathematical Graphing Without The Brick

Reviewer’s Comments
We found Calculator AXL Graphing Calculator fairly easy to use although we weren’t quite convinced to give up our graphing calculator yet. This iPhone/iPod touch-compatible app has a simple calculator as well as the ability to work with graphs, including polar and parametric functions.

One thing we liked about this education app is that it utilizes some of the touchscreen abilities, such as zooming in on graphs and double tapping at an intersection provides the coordinates. One thing we didn’t like is that it does not have an equal sign, so you can’t enter into the calculator for example 2X+4=8 and have it solve for X. Also when you do push the enter key your work disappears, so if you put in for example 8+2+4+6 enter, it only shows the answer 20, so if you accidently typed in a 5 instead of a 2, it is hard to know that or change it. This is the same for all operations.

The number and operations keys work very well but we noticed that sometimes when you hit “enter” which is very close to “graph,” it goes to the graph.

Overall, the calculator app is functional and can perform quite a few common operations. This calculator does though require a bit of getting used to if you are used to a standard calculator, for example you have to learn that the carrot symbol ^ is to raise something to a power, which is often used in computer-based math programs. We can’t imagine giving up the reliable and highly functional graphing calculator for advanced mathematics or calculus-based physics. For lower division math classes like Algebra I and trigonometry this calculator should suffice and is much more affordable than even simple graphing calculators.

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