Calculators So Important Yet We Take It For Granted

After volunteering at several NGO’s over the past few years, mainly in their educational departments, I never got used to the fact that these children lack the most basic equipment to help them with their education. One day while I was teaching maths in Cambodia, I whipped out my calculator to make a speedy summary of a paper I was drafting for their maths test. The children were in awe because they had never seen a calculator before, let alone the large financial calculator I was clicking away at. I had children as old as 18 in my class peering at the calculator as if it was some strange creature from a distant universe. 

I remember that I was in Grade 5 when calculators were introduced to us and we had to start using them during our maths examinations. I didn’t know where to begin, how to explain something as simple as a financial calculator, an object we take for granted like many things in our world. It was then that I realised what a difference calculators can make and the contribution to the improvement of the children’s maths levels. I decided to get calculators donated to the children and the schools in less fortunate rural areas.

The children could not get enough of this little machine called a Calculator, I decided to start a fund raiser and have some financial calculators and classic pocket calculators donated to my school. The fund raiser was so successful that we were able to provide every child with a calculator and have some left over! People donated all sorts of models, even some I had never seen before. Some calculators were so old I was surprised a mechanical calculator hadn’t been donated. The assortment included all kinds of calculators from financial calculators to scientific calculators, trigonometric and statistical calculators to graphing calculators. It was a wonderful experience that taught me the value of things many take for granted.

If you have an old calculator, appliance or anything else lying around collecting dust why not find a home where the real value is still to be calculated?

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