ABSTRACT
The use of calculators has seldom been far from the headlines. The range of views expressed in the press and elsewhere demonstrate that the effective use of calculators is not a simple business. I would suggest that the teacher’s primary objective is to create robust learners, i.e. children who enjoy struggling with mathematical problems, even when they get stuck. Producing a class full to robust or resilient learners requires that they have plenty of factual knowledge and that they understand some big ideas. They need to have more than just a set of skills. They also need the ability to call on their skills, build them into strategies at will and know that they have permission to invent their own ways of doing things.
