Last year, shortly after it announced that the Calculator app in Windows 10 was going open-source, Microsoft started working on a new graphing mode for the app. It"s been almost a year since then, but it looks like the feature is making its way to users sooner rather than later.
As part of its BETT announcements today, Microsoft has said that the Calculator app will be able to graph equations before this year"s back-to-school season, giving students a new way to visualize equations on their computers. The feature seems to offer plenty of insight into how equations work, and though it"s bound to be useful for learning, educators can disable the app on school machines during assessments, for example.
Right now, Windows Insiders in the Fast ring can already test the feature in the latest version of the Calculator app, and it should make its way to more rings before it hits general availability.
Microsoft made plenty of other announcements at BETT, including the addition of equation tools to OneNote in Windows 10, which let users create a wide range of equations with the necessary symbols. What"s more, the Math Assistant in OneNote is coming to the iPad version of the app, with the ability to solve equations and see step-by-step solutions. In the future, it will also be able to graph equations. Finally, students in schools will be able to connect OneNote to a Microsoft Translator captions session, receiving the captions and translations directly into OneNote with the ability to take notes at the same time.
There"s even more addition for OneNote Class Notebooks -the ability to bulk delete a distributed page for every student. In OneNote for the web, you"ll soon be able to save a copy of an entire notebook, starting with users inside the same Office 365 organization. Educators can also now distribute pages from a non-education notebook to students in a class.
There are other features for Microsoft"s range of products for education, including improvements to Whiteboard and much more. You can find all the news from BETT in Microsoft"s Education Blog.