Scientific or graphing calculator? What calculator should students purchase? As your kids grow older, that school supply list may get shorter, but it's not always cheaper. One item that could trigger sticker shock to parents of middle and high school students is a specially designed calculator. Many schools prefer if students possess their own hand-held scientific calculator. In the highest level math courses, such as Advanced Calculus A graphing calculator may be required. But, what's the real difference? Scientific calculators can do things beyond subtraction, addition, division and multiplication. Scientific calculators typically have buttons specifically designed for parentheses, trigonometric functions, exponents inverses and pi -- among other things. A graphing calculator does even more. It'll have a larger screen that allows you to type in a function, then display a graph of it. The Best buy's Geek Squad agent Derek Meister states that scienti...