Free scientific calculator resources to share with your students

By Amarpreet Singh Kular

Even the most powerful tools aren’t much use if you don’t know how to operate them.

That’s why we at Casio Education offer as much support as possible to help everyone make effective use of our calculators, including the recently upgraded ClassWiz scientific calculator range.

Our primary focus is on working with teachers, but the resources we offer are also available and relevant to students.

What scientific calculator support is available?

You’ll find lots of support on our dedicated ClassWiz help page, including a webinar recording and worksheets that you can print out and share with students in the classroom.

The sheets range in focus and difficulty level to support teaching and learning throughout key stages 3 and 4. They cover everything from the most basic calculator operations to more advanced, testable skills, like generating a table of values for a quadratic.

We also provide lots of video content on our website and YouTube channel that can help students get the best out of their scientific calculators. There are short ‘key skill’ videos that focus on specific calculator features, as well as longer ‘teaching and learning’ videos that take a deeper dive into how calculator functionality can be applied to maths concepts and questions.

Another resource we’re excited about is a fully interactive manual that is available for every model in the ClassWiz scientific calculator range. This is set to be released in the near future. Teachers and students can use this to understand the full functionality of the calculator. It lets you click on any key on the handset, which then transfers you to a new page that explains what you’ve clicked on, how it works and further support.

Elsewhere, you can point your students towards our regular revision webinars, which focus on using the fx-83GT CW and fx-85GT CW for Foundation tier exams and the fx-991CW for Higher papers.

Adapted from our ClassWiz webinar series, we also have a pre-recorded training webinar designed by teachers for teachers, which can be used for personal or departmental CPD. This webinar explores popular functions on the new CW ClassWiz range.

Passing on help from the experts

As well as producing our own resources and tools for support, we’re always looking to pass on first-hand insights and tools from the people who use our scientific calculators every day.

Claire Clay, Lead Practitioner for Maths at Ormiston Academies Trust, is a big advocate for calculator use in classrooms. Claire has created a collection of easily accessible information cards and short videos showing how to execute a range of operations on the fx-83GT CW.

All freely available on Google Drive, they could be particularly useful for students curious about how our entry-level scientific calculator can be used for tasks like viewing inequalities on a number line and finding highest common factors.

Claire has also been kind enough to share her thoughts with us on why calculators should be used more in schools and making the transition to the new fx-83GT CW and fx-85GT CW handsets.

Being able to use a scientific calculator effectively not only aids students’ learning, but also helps you deliver more efficient and productive lessons.

To find out more about the resources we offer to help with this, you can sign up for regular email updates.