I had this experience with Texas Instruments graphing calculators in the 00s. They have a language, TI-BASIC that was my first introduction to programming. You

I had this experience with Texas Instruments graphing calculators in the 00s. They have a language, TI-BASIC that was my first introduction to programming. You can even make small games with ASCII characters on the screen (ex: I made one where a “Y” you controlled with the arrow keys fell through “floors with holes” made of dashes and spaces). Obviously super helpful for science and math classes, which was the only way I used it at first. You can program with just the calculator itself; you don’t even need a computer. I think TI-83/TI-84 are still used in classrooms, which is what I used.