9 ms·

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments

165 points by awwstn 13y ago

wyager 13y ago
Perhaps the author's arguments about the benefits of graphing calculators are legitimate, but there is no reason that this is specific to TI. TI 8* calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern features.
- jcdavis 13y ago
  I don't think he necessarily argued it is specific to TI, rather just used as an example. As someone who started first coding on a TI-83+, I have to agree. The ease of tinkering is not matched by lot of modern tech products.
- bluedino 13y ago
  >> TI 8* calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern features. It's something, which is better than nothing to a bored kid in math class. So many hours spent in study hall getting a dots to form patterns on the screen.
  - yareally 13y ago
    It was the first device I learned to program on. Part of that was probably the allure of how simple it was to get started on since the device did not give you a bunch of distracting features/apps by default. Amazing what you end up doing when you're bored in school and have the calculator manual with you (and a little "necessity is the mother of all invention" tossed in for apps related to solving equations and such for class). Graphing calculators are nothing to scoff at, even if they're not considered "modern" by those that wished they had a fancy IPS LCD screen, 2GB of RAM and high powered ARM CPU. Overpriced? Heck yeah. Overrated and obsolete? Only if one thinks they are.
- tantalor 13y ago
  Do you know an alternative which is cheaper or has the missing features?
  - zokier 13y ago
    Some random <$100 android device. Of course the software situation is not actually that great afaik, and the lack of hw keyboard bit sad. But you could add BT keyboard probably if you felt the need to. http://www.pandawill.com/ippo-m8-a20-tablet-pc-8-inch-android-42-8gb-dual-camera-hdmi-rose-p78557.html http://www.pandawill.com/ippo-m8-a20-tablet-pc-8-inch-androi... just some example what you can get nowdays for 100 bucks
  - Moto7451 13y ago
    Perfect for the majority of student uses: http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator/product_510052?cid=PS:GooglePLAs:510052&KPID=510052 http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator/... Aside from playing Ti 8* games. I'm not sure what engineers need in a calculator so I can't comment on that, but in my use case (nearly a decade ago) I could have gotten one of these and been just fine. I got a TI83 because it was the standard issue. In my own personal use (scientific calculators for hobbyist purposes) I've switched to Casios since they just have outright nicer displays than the selection of HPs and TIs at Fry's and they cost a bunch less.
- markrages 13y ago
  Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/768/ http://xkcd.com/768/
rickdale 13y ago
Great article. I used to ask girls for phone numbers and such by borrowing their calculators and writing a small program. For my biggest crush I wrote her a program that spit out nice quotes whenever she ran it, what a blast. My response to the article though is that kids today have iPads and other tablets and they will delve into those they way we embraced the TI-83.
- mscottmcbee 13y ago
  The article talks about the difficulty in that. With the TI-8x series you could work directly on the device. With today's tablets you need a computer and developer licenses.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Then again we are talking about a device called a 'programmable calculator', you can't really compare it to an iPad. It's funny how the barrier of entry to programming is higher now in some cases, but lower in others. In the old days computers booted to BASIC. C compilers etc cost hundreds of dollars. Today's devices don't boot into BASIC but you can get a ton of programming environments and tools for nothing other than the cost of a download or copying a disk. Even to work with Apple devices you're only looking at $99/year (not counting $1,000 for the necessary Mac) Maybe Apple should make some sort of student license where you can work with 1-5 devices but you can't publish on the store?
    - rjsw 13y ago
      The first device that I wrote a program for was a TI-57, this was a couple of years before I learned BASIC, the idea that you can make something follow your instructions is important.
  - fiatmoney 13y ago
    Or something like this: http://pythonforios.com http://pythonforios.com Which nicely replicates the feeling of laboriously typing in code you acquired from who-knows-where.
  - 13y ago
danso 13y ago
Anyone ever play "Dope Hunter"? Actually I forgot what it was called exactly, but it was like a Legend of the Red Dragon type game, except you were a drug dealer, and it worked on TI-81s. I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves. However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.
- wikyd 13y ago
  I think it was called Drug Wars.
- chch 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars I always knew it as Dope Wars, but I believe this is the game you were referencing.
  - libraryatnight 13y ago
    I loved this game in high school. We played the Windows version in my networking class. I remember shouts of "Ahh yea, cocaine is super cheap in _____!" going across the room as we tried to outmatch each other's cash pool.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I really like Microsoft's TouchDevelop suite, a Microsoft Research project that tries to bring programming into a touch-friendly IDE. It's not insanely powerful, but then again neither is a TI calculator. I know Android has some IDEs for various languages, I haven't heard of Apple allowing for a scripting language to be both written and run on the device. I think doing that would allow for some of these fears to be mitigated.
- yareally 13y ago
kristoffer 13y ago
I bought the TI-85 dispite it being an older model because it had been hacked so I could program it in z80 assembler.
- zokier 13y ago
  TI-86 can be programmed in asm without hacks (I had both 85 until it broke down and 86).
jacobolus 13y ago
Graphing calculators are entirely unnecessary for learning high school/college mathematics/physics/etc. (though they might be useful for engineering students working on-site where access to a full computer is impractical – I don't have such experience with that, so can’t comment). There is no good pedagogical reason for assigning problems to students which use numbers that can’t be worked out easily on paper or with a regular scientific calculator. Forcing students to expend effort on keeping track of many-digit numbers is in general an unnecessary mental load which distracts from the concepts being taught. Including "how to use your calculator" sections as part of mathematics instruction, and assigning "calculator problems" which include e.g. unreasonably complex symbolic integration problems or unreasonably precise numbers, for the sake of giving students practice with a graphing calculator interface is a waste of teacher and student effort. Additionally, Because Texas Instruments has so effectively lobbied textbook authors and test writers and school administrations to get their calculators on the list of approved/official devices, many students are prompted to spend an unreasonable amount of money on calculators which they do not need. It’s something like a tax on those students. TI graphing calculators have awful, obtuse interfaces. Their programming and debugging tools are rudimentary and outdated. Their graphics capabilities are limited, and graphics made with them can’t be used for any other purpose or easily shared. Students would be much better served by lessons/mentoring on the use of regular general-purpose computers and programming languages, whether for mathematics or whatever else. If they need symbolic integration or graphing capabilities for solving some concrete engineering problem, or for exploring, they would be much better served by a tool such as Mathematica or Maple [or heck, Python] than by a TI calculator. Full computers are much better for inputting and interacting with data and mathematical structures. It's been 9 years since I was in high school. But on principle, I never bought a graphing calculator, and I never found it to be any disadvantage in any course I encountered in high school or college [except, briefly, on the AP Calculus test, where I had to familiarize myself with the TI83's awful UI on a borrowed calculator during the test; it didn’t end up hurting my score]. However, I found programming in Maple, and later Python, to be invaluable in solving all sorts of problems.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I personally loved using my graphing calculator especially in classes where it was not required. Statistics and accounting, for example, were classes were we were expected to memorize formulas that I found to be difficult to learn. Come test day, though, I had programmed those formulas into a note on my TI 86. The teachers always gave their reasons why they were forcing us to memorize these equations that in the real world we would have written down (or use software to solve for us), but I never bought into it. And they never forced me to erase my calculator's memory before the exam.
kabdib 13y ago
I'm going to have a hard time with this when the school district mandates that my son use a calculator that has an "Equals" key. We've always been an HP family. RPN all the way. I literally am unable to use a TI calculator (well, they may well have Enter keys now -- I know the newer HP calcs have Equals keys of a sort, which you can ignore). My son will not be using a scientific calculator as broken as the TI ones. You think I'm joking. I'm not. (I'll probably have to relent and let him use a TI, but I'm going to show him RPN first...)
- xradionut 13y ago
  So he thinks his Pop is on top of the stack?
josecastillo 13y ago
In high school my friends and I decided that once we understood the concept of, say, the Pythagorean Theorem, making us solve it over and over again was busywork. So we made programs to solve things, and then an application called AMATH to collect all those programs. At one point the teachers caught wind of this app everyone was using, and made everyone start showing their work. So I reprogrammed my modules to show their work, line by line. I soon forgot about all of this and went into an unrelated area of study at university; I think I only ever took one college-level comp sci class. Today I make my living in mobile apps.
xradionut 13y ago
Never really had a graphing calculator when I was in school. Bought 92 Plus years later just to have a ultraportable "computer" for field work. LCD screen is starting to decay after years of use, so I picked up another in "mint" condition for $40 at a used book store. Would love to take the old one and replace the screen and processor with something more modern, keeping the keyboard.
jere 13y ago
I too wrote my first code on a TI-81. Though I had been making games for a while with various tools (e.g. TGF), it was nice to finally close the loop and write in a programming language, even if it was only BASIC. That pushed me to take a programming course in high school the following year. I was writing pong and asteroid clones and ray casting engines in class. The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming. I haven't developed in iOS, but I did play around with Android and the thing that really frustrated me was that the sample games were several files and ~1,000 LOC. We're talking really simple games and the amount of boilerplate crap was mind boggling. To even get to that point, of course, you have to screw around with an IDE, plugins, an emulator, etc. It's a far cry from PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
- MaysonL 13y ago
  I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming. Soulver, Pythonista, Pixie Scheme, Scheme Programming Language, Lisping.
  - jere 13y ago
    I kind of figured the tools were out there and selected the word stumbling carefully. Even so, those look pretty awesome.
  - S4M 13y ago
    That's right, it must be possible to install an app that enables to program from the iPad (I don't owe one, so I may be wrong on that), but unlike the calculator, the programming environment is not included with the device, so many students who were not exposed to programming before will not even think of installing it on the iPad.
    - acdha 13y ago
      If you don't want to install something new, there's a pre-installed app called Safari which has a full programming language rather fast runtime and extensive display capabilities.
egb 13y ago
My kid just got a school-issued iPad in 5th grade. Awesome! But he's also required to buy a lame-o TI calculator as well?! Why?! Oh, because the standardized testing companies are freaked out by iPads. TI has a stranglehold because of a lack of wifi??? How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests? I'm getting flashbacks to all the open vs closed book debates about testing that I went through in high school and college...
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests? Remove the ability to communicate, boot it to a standard image that doesn't allow cheats.
  - yareally 13y ago
    Someone will find a way if given the will and the time. Finding a way around imposed restrictions is much more for fun and the challenge than the actual cheating (mainly because the amount of effort involved in doing it means you know or end up learning the material in the process). 5th graders may not be as much of a worry, but students approaching and in high school would be. It might detour some, but not those with a more "hacker mentality." Just for comparison, all of my Computer Science Exams were given on paper and this was all within the last 5-6 years. Why? Because given the ability to use a computer, someone would have found a way to get an advantage, probably more for the challenge than the actual cheating. This was at one of the top 5 largest universities in the United States as well, so there was no shortage of money or brainpower.
  - egb 13y ago
    It sucks that googling for something counts as cheating, when really it's a skill that applies to about 90% of real life :-)
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Last year I caught two students IM'ing during a final. Most of my exams are open book, open note; so I am not unsympathetic to the realities of how a real job is[1]. [1] source: I used to have a real job.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Let me tell you why I hate TI's shitty calculators. Mainly because they are marketed so aggressively to educators. Back in 1990, I was given a TI scientific calculator, and some exercises to practice. I was to enter the UIL contest titled "Calculator Math" or something like that. It was a speed contest. My school (small rural public school), having the smartest and best-prepared students won at the first level of competition beating everyone. We punched our buttons furiously, we were punching buttons as fast as is possible without having registration errors. We figured nobody could beat us, since we made few errors. At the next level we competed, something went wrong. The test went as usual, we finished most of the exam in the allotted time, but did not score well enough to advance. The thing is, after about two-thirds of the allotted time had passed, students from other schools started getting up and leaving. During the exam, I smugly assumed they were giving up because I _knew_ that nobody was a significantly faster button-pusher than me, not by that large an amount. I was puzzled. Later I learned what an RPN calculator was, and began to understand what happened. I am a college instructor today, and I have yet to meet a student who knows what an RPN calculator is. Nearly every teacher's supply catalog that gets crammed into my mail sells TI exclusively.
- jff 13y ago
  Partway through college I bought an old HP-48 and suddenly had this realization. The TI system encourages you to enter exactly what you see on the page, plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and everyone's paranoid about order of operations. With RPN, you just do the math.
  - zokier 13y ago
    > plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and everyone's paranoid about order of operations Oh yeah.. and no paren matching either and iirc multiline editing was inconvenient enough that i never used it.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  It won't get you quite the same power as a proper RPN scientific, but Cabamap is great: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/323/32326.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/323/32326.html "Cabamap is a flash application for the 83+/SE that performs arbitrary-precision integer calculations. Simply stated, it can do things like calculate the exact value of 2000! or 2^1024. It uses RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) as the user interface, and is intended as a complete system for long integer calculations. The only limit is available memory (roughly 24000 digits)."
tzs 13y ago
> It wasn't until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81 graphing calculator, that the medium became a feasible platform for game design Nonsense. People were writing calculator games long before graphing calculators were introduced. There were lunar lander games for HP and TI calculators in the late '70s and early '80s, for example. HP had a "Game Pac" for the HP-67 that included blackjack, craps, a slot machine game, a sub hunt game, an artillery firing game, a space war game, a game based on "Mastermind", Nim, and more. The HP-41C, introduced in 1979, and (amusingly) discontinued in 1990 (the year the author says game design became feasible on calculators) had an alphanumeric display so it could do word-based games, and Hangman and an an Adventure-like game were available.
- sigil 13y ago
  The article also makes it sound like TI released the first graphing calculator in 1990. In fact, HP did that a full 3 years earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C I much preferred programming the HP-28 (and later the HP-48G) to the TI-8x series. An RPN language is a natural extension of the calculator interface, while a BASIC interpreter always felt like a weird bolt-on.
bluetshirt 13y ago
Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  It is easier to lug a graphing calculator around than a laptop, particularly in schools. I spent countless hours programming on my calculator while sitting in cars, hiding in the back pews at church, inside of tents during camping trips, sitting in the back row of classrooms,... It was something I could do that caught my attention while forced to be someplace I had no interest in being. I don't think web development gets you that.
  - bluetshirt 13y ago
    Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for school. She has to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of university professors that would freak out if you tried that. (Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way.. It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan. Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80 assembly.... When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself. Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I still have my TI-92+, it was the pinnacle of graphing calculators, basically running Mathematica on the equivalent of a Sun-1 workstation in your hand. And of course TI-Basic. While the article suffers a bit from nostalgia, the central message that young people develop learning skills from 'constructable' activities (be it programming a calculator or building things in shop class) is something we have put at risk. In many ways "art" is the most important class you can take in High School since it can challenge your thinking in ways that no amount of rote memorization can. The bottom line for me was that its great that some folks can see the benefit, but not a whole lot of ideas about keeping that spirit alive in the school system.
lunixbochs 13y ago
For anyone nostalgic about TI-BASIC, I implemented the 83/84 variant a while back: https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas It lacks advanced math tokens and graph screen IO, but it's incredibly easy to extend and emulates much of the language's quirky behavior. (-> terminates the token stack, end quotes are optional, you can use "If; End", order of operations, matrices, lists, menus) There's a VT100 terminal output module which allows you to play home screen games like Mofrog, but I haven't implemented a graph screen IO module yet. You can run arbitrary .BAS files found on the internet.
mightybyte 13y ago
I agree with the author that the iPad could definitely be a more approachable platform. However, I think that the comparison to a TI-83 is also a little bit naive. The TI has a 64 x 96 pixel greyscale display. The iPad's resolution 2048 x 1536 in full color with a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. In order to work with that, we have huge APIs implementing complex abstractions. And all that extra complexity must be dealt with using an antiquated programming language with horrible syntax. Yes, we could create some kind of simple emulator that makes it possible to write simple things as easily as they could be done in TI-BASIC. But what kid wants to write a nibbles or mario clone when they can with a few finger taps be playing a 3D shooter or racing game. The simple reality is that we are no longer in the frontier days of computing, and I would argue that our languages and abstractions haven't kept pace with other advancements. The easy things have all been done. And the interesting things that haven't been done are hard. That has a significant role in what the author is talking about. There are also other forces at play--such as the very large economic interests that exist around programming iOS--that weren't a factor for TI back in the day. So while I'm all for the author's thesis that things should be more explorable, I think he's ignoring the fact that a significant amount of essential complexity has made that a much more difficult proposition than it used to be.
canadev 13y ago
IMO, this is a beautiful article. The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two." I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought the computer alive for me. Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator. I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much more. Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to teach her how to program. For me, programming is a big part of life! Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees the value in this.
robterrell 13y ago
I'm accustomed to popular blog blowhards repeating the "you can't write code on an iPad" mantra, but I expect better here. We all know you can write code on an iPad, right? Off the top of my head, I can think of free/cheap apps in the app store for JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Perl. Or Lua... my kids have my hand-me-down iPads. Each has Codea installed. Codea is a gorgeous Lua development environment with a great on-device editor and great libraries for sprites, sound, touch, accelerometer, and physics. For some things, the Codea editor is better than what I use at work. For instance, if a function takes a color value as an argument, when the cursor is in that character position, a color picker pops up. Likewise, when using the sprite command, instead of typing in a name you can open a popover that displays a list of sprites on the device. It pulls assets from your photo library or links to your dropbox, so you can easily get assets in and out of the device. My daughter decided to make a program to implement the sorting hat from Harry Potter. She googled for images of the sorting hat and other harry potter things, saved them to the device, and spent an hour obsessively re-writing her draw function so that things appeared where she wanted them to. She was stumped by randomness, so I helped her look in the built-in reference for math.random() and, with another assist on how to write an if-else block, she figured out how to use it. Keyboard input was rougher (Codea lacks the common UI widgets) but she got something working to her satisfaction. So, after a few hours of playing around, she had a fun little sorting hat toy. She understands variables, incrementing variables every frame to create animation, what the word "random" really means (as opposed to her previous definition for the word, from some Disney channel show), and how to do some basic if-else flow control. Now when people ask her about her iPad, she says she knows Lua and shows them her sorting hat. Codea can export directly to an Xcode project, so next weekend we're going to turn her sorting hat game into an app and install it on her iPad. I think that's when she'll be fully converted into a mobile app developing geek. So, the article... there's a fun walk down memory lane (I, too, goofed off in school writing games for a programmable calculator) but it's unfortunate that he framed it with a TI-verus-iPad. Plus, his conclusion is just plain wrong.
- bonaldi 13y ago
  That is incredibly great, Rob! Good on her.
- 13y ago
eplumlee 13y ago
Shows how much we've declined. Kids nowadays use graphing calculators in JHS algebra. We had no calculators, and calculus in my JHS by the 10th grade.
shurcooL 13y ago
I miss this. I used to have a Palm device. It had a black and white 320x320 screen, slow CPU, low memory, and no Wi-Fi. But I could run PocketC on it and work on a hobby game project, either on a computer or the device itself. A few years later I got an iPhone 3GS. It had a much faster CPU, better screen, wifi and 3G Internet with a browser that could display desktop websites. It was leaps and bounds more powerful and capable than the Palm device, except I couldn't actually develop any pet game project on the device itself (in a C-like language; I suppose JS dev is possible).
davexunit 13y ago
It's a shame that iPads are being pushed so heavily in the educational space. Apple products are built upon denying users access to learn about the hardware and software. Educators should be fighting against walled gardens.
Havoc 13y ago
This must be an American thing. All the exams I have ever written (grade 1 to post grad) specified graphing calculators are prohibited. Every last one. Graphing calculators tend to be programmable and/or can save text files & local educational institutions didn't want to go there.
ibrahima 13y ago
Holy crap, I played Desolate, that game was seriously amazing for a calculator. The graphics rivaled the original Game Boy (a decade later, but still). It was seriously smooth and well made.
xlayn 13y ago
What if that liberty, that sense of discovering how to change it was not an intended side effect, and the more controlled ipad environment is? agree that exposure to that "primitive" environment and the desire to create something great would force the user to make use of ingenuity. agreed that incredibly constrained tools and no very high level language is included, yet still reducing high level problems to low level instructions can allow to discover and see something that could have been hidden by better tools. or can it be just nostalgia?
bane 13y ago
For those interested www.ticalc.org is an incredible archive dedicated to these little computers. I love TI calcs so much that the first app I install on a new phone are the TI calc emulators.
wsc981 13y ago
When I read about the language TI-BASIC in the above article, it reminded me of my old TI-99/4A computer[0], which I got from my dad to learn programming. This computer also included a TI-BASIC language, I wonder if they are in any way related, except of course from being a BASIC language created by Texas Instruments. It would be cool if old TI-99/4A games would be playable on "modern" TI graphic calculators. I still have two TI-99/4A computers in my cellar, for nostalgic reasons :) [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
Graphic calculators are totally obsolete now. You could run circles around it with a Nintendo DS with homebrew, Sony hand held consoles and of course the Ipad, Iphone or Android. But don't expect to convince your 50-60 year old teachers in University to let you use it. In spite of showing the apps that I had done for structural analysis in my Nintendo DS, they could not let me use it, I had to buy one of those stupid, overpriced, obsolete graphic calculators.
drdaeman 13y ago
I don't see any competition at programmable calculator's market. Why noone gets a modern SoC, connects it to a modern OLED display (but keep hardware keyboard, please), burns in basic DirectFB-based GNU userland with tons of readily available free science (not only math) and programming tools, designs an basic UI over the thing (most hard part), keeps the POSIX shell available and device completely unlocked, and starts selling the product? I do believe there are parents who would like their kid to have a good calculator to aid in the school, but don't want them to have an iOS/Android tablet (as it's more likely the kid will end up playing or using it for social networks). I mean, replace everything that sucks about graphing calculators - outdated (and seriously overpriced) hardware and limited programming and debugging functionality (if you're about to argue - please compare TI calculator to your development workstation to see what I mean), but keep the device feel generally science- rather than entertainment-oriented? In short: a handheld device with a general feel of modern programmable calculator, with (preinstalled) Maxima, Octave, PHYSICA, R, Python, Racket and so on under the hood, and without any [readily available] "app store" full of games. Or such products do exist, but I just haven't stumbled on anything like this?
rdl 13y ago
What we really need is HyperCard for the iPad, ideally with a Parse-like service to let you easily write network code, not crappy TI-Basic.

165 points by awwstn 13y ago

Perhaps the author's arguments about the benefits of graphing calculators are legitimate, but there is no reason that this is specific to TI. TI 8* calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern features.

jcdavis 13y ago
I don't think he necessarily argued it is specific to TI, rather just used as an example. As someone who started first coding on a TI-83+, I have to agree. The ease of tinkering is not matched by lot of modern tech products.
bluedino 13y ago
>> TI 8* calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern features. It's something, which is better than nothing to a bored kid in math class. So many hours spent in study hall getting a dots to form patterns on the screen.
- yareally 13y ago
  It was the first device I learned to program on. Part of that was probably the allure of how simple it was to get started on since the device did not give you a bunch of distracting features/apps by default. Amazing what you end up doing when you're bored in school and have the calculator manual with you (and a little "necessity is the mother of all invention" tossed in for apps related to solving equations and such for class). Graphing calculators are nothing to scoff at, even if they're not considered "modern" by those that wished they had a fancy IPS LCD screen, 2GB of RAM and high powered ARM CPU. Overpriced? Heck yeah. Overrated and obsolete? Only if one thinks they are.
tantalor 13y ago
Do you know an alternative which is cheaper or has the missing features?
- zokier 13y ago
  Some random <$100 android device. Of course the software situation is not actually that great afaik, and the lack of hw keyboard bit sad. But you could add BT keyboard probably if you felt the need to. http://www.pandawill.com/ippo-m8-a20-tablet-pc-8-inch-android-42-8gb-dual-camera-hdmi-rose-p78557.html http://www.pandawill.com/ippo-m8-a20-tablet-pc-8-inch-androi... just some example what you can get nowdays for 100 bucks
- Moto7451 13y ago
  Perfect for the majority of student uses: http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator/product_510052?cid=PS:GooglePLAs:510052&KPID=510052 http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator/... Aside from playing Ti 8* games. I'm not sure what engineers need in a calculator so I can't comment on that, but in my use case (nearly a decade ago) I could have gotten one of these and been just fine. I got a TI83 because it was the standard issue. In my own personal use (scientific calculators for hobbyist purposes) I've switched to Casios since they just have outright nicer displays than the selection of HPs and TIs at Fry's and they cost a bunch less.
markrages 13y ago
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/768/ http://xkcd.com/768/

rickdale 13y ago

Great article. I used to ask girls for phone numbers and such by borrowing their calculators and writing a small program. For my biggest crush I wrote her a program that spit out nice quotes whenever she ran it, what a blast. My response to the article though is that kids today have iPads and other tablets and they will delve into those they way we embraced the TI-83.

mscottmcbee 13y ago
The article talks about the difficulty in that. With the TI-8x series you could work directly on the device. With today's tablets you need a computer and developer licenses.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Then again we are talking about a device called a 'programmable calculator', you can't really compare it to an iPad. It's funny how the barrier of entry to programming is higher now in some cases, but lower in others. In the old days computers booted to BASIC. C compilers etc cost hundreds of dollars. Today's devices don't boot into BASIC but you can get a ton of programming environments and tools for nothing other than the cost of a download or copying a disk. Even to work with Apple devices you're only looking at $99/year (not counting $1,000 for the necessary Mac) Maybe Apple should make some sort of student license where you can work with 1-5 devices but you can't publish on the store?
  - rjsw 13y ago
    The first device that I wrote a program for was a TI-57, this was a couple of years before I learned BASIC, the idea that you can make something follow your instructions is important.
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  Or something like this: http://pythonforios.com http://pythonforios.com Which nicely replicates the feeling of laboriously typing in code you acquired from who-knows-where.
- 13y ago

danso 13y ago

Anyone ever play "Dope Hunter"? Actually I forgot what it was called exactly, but it was like a Legend of the Red Dragon type game, except you were a drug dealer, and it worked on TI-81s. I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves. However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.

wikyd 13y ago
I think it was called Drug Wars.
chch 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars I always knew it as Dope Wars, but I believe this is the game you were referencing.
- libraryatnight 13y ago
  I loved this game in high school. We played the Windows version in my networking class. I remember shouts of "Ahh yea, cocaine is super cheap in _____!" going across the room as we tried to outmatch each other's cash pool.
freehunter 13y ago
I really like Microsoft's TouchDevelop suite, a Microsoft Research project that tries to bring programming into a touch-friendly IDE. It's not insanely powerful, but then again neither is a TI calculator. I know Android has some IDEs for various languages, I haven't heard of Apple allowing for a scripting language to be both written and run on the device. I think doing that would allow for some of these fears to be mitigated.
yareally 13y ago

kristoffer 13y ago

I bought the TI-85 dispite it being an older model because it had been hacked so I could program it in z80 assembler.

zokier 13y ago
TI-86 can be programmed in asm without hacks (I had both 85 until it broke down and 86).

jacobolus 13y ago

Graphing calculators are entirely unnecessary for learning high school/college mathematics/physics/etc. (though they might be useful for engineering students working on-site where access to a full computer is impractical – I don't have such experience with that, so can’t comment). There is no good pedagogical reason for assigning problems to students which use numbers that can’t be worked out easily on paper or with a regular scientific calculator. Forcing students to expend effort on keeping track of many-digit numbers is in general an unnecessary mental load which distracts from the concepts being taught. Including "how to use your calculator" sections as part of mathematics instruction, and assigning "calculator problems" which include e.g. unreasonably complex symbolic integration problems or unreasonably precise numbers, for the sake of giving students practice with a graphing calculator interface is a waste of teacher and student effort. Additionally, Because Texas Instruments has so effectively lobbied textbook authors and test writers and school administrations to get their calculators on the list of approved/official devices, many students are prompted to spend an unreasonable amount of money on calculators which they do not need. It’s something like a tax on those students. TI graphing calculators have awful, obtuse interfaces. Their programming and debugging tools are rudimentary and outdated. Their graphics capabilities are limited, and graphics made with them can’t be used for any other purpose or easily shared. Students would be much better served by lessons/mentoring on the use of regular general-purpose computers and programming languages, whether for mathematics or whatever else. If they need symbolic integration or graphing capabilities for solving some concrete engineering problem, or for exploring, they would be much better served by a tool such as Mathematica or Maple [or heck, Python] than by a TI calculator. Full computers are much better for inputting and interacting with data and mathematical structures. It's been 9 years since I was in high school. But on principle, I never bought a graphing calculator, and I never found it to be any disadvantage in any course I encountered in high school or college [except, briefly, on the AP Calculus test, where I had to familiarize myself with the TI83's awful UI on a borrowed calculator during the test; it didn’t end up hurting my score]. However, I found programming in Maple, and later Python, to be invaluable in solving all sorts of problems.

freehunter 13y ago
I personally loved using my graphing calculator especially in classes where it was not required. Statistics and accounting, for example, were classes were we were expected to memorize formulas that I found to be difficult to learn. Come test day, though, I had programmed those formulas into a note on my TI 86. The teachers always gave their reasons why they were forcing us to memorize these equations that in the real world we would have written down (or use software to solve for us), but I never bought into it. And they never forced me to erase my calculator's memory before the exam.

kabdib 13y ago

I'm going to have a hard time with this when the school district mandates that my son use a calculator that has an "Equals" key. We've always been an HP family. RPN all the way. I literally am unable to use a TI calculator (well, they may well have Enter keys now -- I know the newer HP calcs have Equals keys of a sort, which you can ignore). My son will not be using a scientific calculator as broken as the TI ones. You think I'm joking. I'm not. (I'll probably have to relent and let him use a TI, but I'm going to show him RPN first...)

xradionut 13y ago
So he thinks his Pop is on top of the stack?

josecastillo 13y ago

In high school my friends and I decided that once we understood the concept of, say, the Pythagorean Theorem, making us solve it over and over again was busywork. So we made programs to solve things, and then an application called AMATH to collect all those programs. At one point the teachers caught wind of this app everyone was using, and made everyone start showing their work. So I reprogrammed my modules to show their work, line by line. I soon forgot about all of this and went into an unrelated area of study at university; I think I only ever took one college-level comp sci class. Today I make my living in mobile apps.

xradionut 13y ago

Never really had a graphing calculator when I was in school. Bought 92 Plus years later just to have a ultraportable "computer" for field work. LCD screen is starting to decay after years of use, so I picked up another in "mint" condition for $40 at a used book store. Would love to take the old one and replace the screen and processor with something more modern, keeping the keyboard.

jere 13y ago

I too wrote my first code on a TI-81. Though I had been making games for a while with various tools (e.g. TGF), it was nice to finally close the loop and write in a programming language, even if it was only BASIC. That pushed me to take a programming course in high school the following year. I was writing pong and asteroid clones and ray casting engines in class. The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming. I haven't developed in iOS, but I did play around with Android and the thing that really frustrated me was that the sample games were several files and ~1,000 LOC. We're talking really simple games and the amount of boilerplate crap was mind boggling. To even get to that point, of course, you have to screw around with an IDE, plugins, an emulator, etc. It's a far cry from PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

MaysonL 13y ago
I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming. Soulver, Pythonista, Pixie Scheme, Scheme Programming Language, Lisping.
- jere 13y ago
  I kind of figured the tools were out there and selected the word stumbling carefully. Even so, those look pretty awesome.
- S4M 13y ago
  That's right, it must be possible to install an app that enables to program from the iPad (I don't owe one, so I may be wrong on that), but unlike the calculator, the programming environment is not included with the device, so many students who were not exposed to programming before will not even think of installing it on the iPad.
  - acdha 13y ago
    If you don't want to install something new, there's a pre-installed app called Safari which has a full programming language rather fast runtime and extensive display capabilities.

egb 13y ago

My kid just got a school-issued iPad in 5th grade. Awesome! But he's also required to buy a lame-o TI calculator as well?! Why?! Oh, because the standardized testing companies are freaked out by iPads. TI has a stranglehold because of a lack of wifi??? How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests? I'm getting flashbacks to all the open vs closed book debates about testing that I went through in high school and college...

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests? Remove the ability to communicate, boot it to a standard image that doesn't allow cheats.
- yareally 13y ago
  Someone will find a way if given the will and the time. Finding a way around imposed restrictions is much more for fun and the challenge than the actual cheating (mainly because the amount of effort involved in doing it means you know or end up learning the material in the process). 5th graders may not be as much of a worry, but students approaching and in high school would be. It might detour some, but not those with a more "hacker mentality." Just for comparison, all of my Computer Science Exams were given on paper and this was all within the last 5-6 years. Why? Because given the ability to use a computer, someone would have found a way to get an advantage, probably more for the challenge than the actual cheating. This was at one of the top 5 largest universities in the United States as well, so there was no shortage of money or brainpower.
- egb 13y ago
  It sucks that googling for something counts as cheating, when really it's a skill that applies to about 90% of real life :-)
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Last year I caught two students IM'ing during a final. Most of my exams are open book, open note; so I am not unsympathetic to the realities of how a real job is[1]. [1] source: I used to have a real job.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Let me tell you why I hate TI's shitty calculators. Mainly because they are marketed so aggressively to educators. Back in 1990, I was given a TI scientific calculator, and some exercises to practice. I was to enter the UIL contest titled "Calculator Math" or something like that. It was a speed contest. My school (small rural public school), having the smartest and best-prepared students won at the first level of competition beating everyone. We punched our buttons furiously, we were punching buttons as fast as is possible without having registration errors. We figured nobody could beat us, since we made few errors. At the next level we competed, something went wrong. The test went as usual, we finished most of the exam in the allotted time, but did not score well enough to advance. The thing is, after about two-thirds of the allotted time had passed, students from other schools started getting up and leaving. During the exam, I smugly assumed they were giving up because I _knew_ that nobody was a significantly faster button-pusher than me, not by that large an amount. I was puzzled. Later I learned what an RPN calculator was, and began to understand what happened. I am a college instructor today, and I have yet to meet a student who knows what an RPN calculator is. Nearly every teacher's supply catalog that gets crammed into my mail sells TI exclusively.

jff 13y ago
Partway through college I bought an old HP-48 and suddenly had this realization. The TI system encourages you to enter exactly what you see on the page, plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and everyone's paranoid about order of operations. With RPN, you just do the math.
- zokier 13y ago
  > plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and everyone's paranoid about order of operations Oh yeah.. and no paren matching either and iirc multiline editing was inconvenient enough that i never used it.
jlgreco 13y ago
It won't get you quite the same power as a proper RPN scientific, but Cabamap is great: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/323/32326.html http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/323/32326.html "Cabamap is a flash application for the 83+/SE that performs arbitrary-precision integer calculations. Simply stated, it can do things like calculate the exact value of 2000! or 2^1024. It uses RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) as the user interface, and is intended as a complete system for long integer calculations. The only limit is available memory (roughly 24000 digits)."

tzs 13y ago

> It wasn't until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81 graphing calculator, that the medium became a feasible platform for game design Nonsense. People were writing calculator games long before graphing calculators were introduced. There were lunar lander games for HP and TI calculators in the late '70s and early '80s, for example. HP had a "Game Pac" for the HP-67 that included blackjack, craps, a slot machine game, a sub hunt game, an artillery firing game, a space war game, a game based on "Mastermind", Nim, and more. The HP-41C, introduced in 1979, and (amusingly) discontinued in 1990 (the year the author says game design became feasible on calculators) had an alphanumeric display so it could do word-based games, and Hangman and an an Adventure-like game were available.

sigil 13y ago
The article also makes it sound like TI released the first graphing calculator in 1990. In fact, HP did that a full 3 years earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C I much preferred programming the HP-28 (and later the HP-48G) to the TI-8x series. An RPN language is a natural extension of the calculator interface, while a BASIC interpreter always felt like a weird bolt-on.

bluetshirt 13y ago

Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.

jlgreco 13y ago
It is easier to lug a graphing calculator around than a laptop, particularly in schools. I spent countless hours programming on my calculator while sitting in cars, hiding in the back pews at church, inside of tents during camping trips, sitting in the back row of classrooms,... It was something I could do that caught my attention while forced to be someplace I had no interest in being. I don't think web development gets you that.
- bluetshirt 13y ago
  Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for school. She has to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of university professors that would freak out if you tried that. (Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way.. It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan. Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80 assembly.... When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself. Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I still have my TI-92+, it was the pinnacle of graphing calculators, basically running Mathematica on the equivalent of a Sun-1 workstation in your hand. And of course TI-Basic. While the article suffers a bit from nostalgia, the central message that young people develop learning skills from 'constructable' activities (be it programming a calculator or building things in shop class) is something we have put at risk. In many ways "art" is the most important class you can take in High School since it can challenge your thinking in ways that no amount of rote memorization can. The bottom line for me was that its great that some folks can see the benefit, but not a whole lot of ideas about keeping that spirit alive in the school system.

lunixbochs 13y ago

For anyone nostalgic about TI-BASIC, I implemented the 83/84 variant a while back: https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas It lacks advanced math tokens and graph screen IO, but it's incredibly easy to extend and emulates much of the language's quirky behavior. (-> terminates the token stack, end quotes are optional, you can use "If; End", order of operations, matrices, lists, menus) There's a VT100 terminal output module which allows you to play home screen games like Mofrog, but I haven't implemented a graph screen IO module yet. You can run arbitrary .BAS files found on the internet.

mightybyte 13y ago

I agree with the author that the iPad could definitely be a more approachable platform. However, I think that the comparison to a TI-83 is also a little bit naive. The TI has a 64 x 96 pixel greyscale display. The iPad's resolution 2048 x 1536 in full color with a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. In order to work with that, we have huge APIs implementing complex abstractions. And all that extra complexity must be dealt with using an antiquated programming language with horrible syntax. Yes, we could create some kind of simple emulator that makes it possible to write simple things as easily as they could be done in TI-BASIC. But what kid wants to write a nibbles or mario clone when they can with a few finger taps be playing a 3D shooter or racing game. The simple reality is that we are no longer in the frontier days of computing, and I would argue that our languages and abstractions haven't kept pace with other advancements. The easy things have all been done. And the interesting things that haven't been done are hard. That has a significant role in what the author is talking about. There are also other forces at play--such as the very large economic interests that exist around programming iOS--that weren't a factor for TI back in the day. So while I'm all for the author's thesis that things should be more explorable, I think he's ignoring the fact that a significant amount of essential complexity has made that a much more difficult proposition than it used to be.

canadev 13y ago

IMO, this is a beautiful article. The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two." I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought the computer alive for me. Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator. I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much more. Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to teach her how to program. For me, programming is a big part of life! Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees the value in this.

robterrell 13y ago

I'm accustomed to popular blog blowhards repeating the "you can't write code on an iPad" mantra, but I expect better here. We all know you can write code on an iPad, right? Off the top of my head, I can think of free/cheap apps in the app store for JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Perl. Or Lua... my kids have my hand-me-down iPads. Each has Codea installed. Codea is a gorgeous Lua development environment with a great on-device editor and great libraries for sprites, sound, touch, accelerometer, and physics. For some things, the Codea editor is better than what I use at work. For instance, if a function takes a color value as an argument, when the cursor is in that character position, a color picker pops up. Likewise, when using the sprite command, instead of typing in a name you can open a popover that displays a list of sprites on the device. It pulls assets from your photo library or links to your dropbox, so you can easily get assets in and out of the device. My daughter decided to make a program to implement the sorting hat from Harry Potter. She googled for images of the sorting hat and other harry potter things, saved them to the device, and spent an hour obsessively re-writing her draw function so that things appeared where she wanted them to. She was stumped by randomness, so I helped her look in the built-in reference for math.random() and, with another assist on how to write an if-else block, she figured out how to use it. Keyboard input was rougher (Codea lacks the common UI widgets) but she got something working to her satisfaction. So, after a few hours of playing around, she had a fun little sorting hat toy. She understands variables, incrementing variables every frame to create animation, what the word "random" really means (as opposed to her previous definition for the word, from some Disney channel show), and how to do some basic if-else flow control. Now when people ask her about her iPad, she says she knows Lua and shows them her sorting hat. Codea can export directly to an Xcode project, so next weekend we're going to turn her sorting hat game into an app and install it on her iPad. I think that's when she'll be fully converted into a mobile app developing geek. So, the article... there's a fun walk down memory lane (I, too, goofed off in school writing games for a programmable calculator) but it's unfortunate that he framed it with a TI-verus-iPad. Plus, his conclusion is just plain wrong.

bonaldi 13y ago
That is incredibly great, Rob! Good on her.
13y ago

eplumlee 13y ago

Shows how much we've declined. Kids nowadays use graphing calculators in JHS algebra. We had no calculators, and calculus in my JHS by the 10th grade.

shurcooL 13y ago

I miss this. I used to have a Palm device. It had a black and white 320x320 screen, slow CPU, low memory, and no Wi-Fi. But I could run PocketC on it and work on a hobby game project, either on a computer or the device itself. A few years later I got an iPhone 3GS. It had a much faster CPU, better screen, wifi and 3G Internet with a browser that could display desktop websites. It was leaps and bounds more powerful and capable than the Palm device, except I couldn't actually develop any pet game project on the device itself (in a C-like language; I suppose JS dev is possible).

davexunit 13y ago

It's a shame that iPads are being pushed so heavily in the educational space. Apple products are built upon denying users access to learn about the hardware and software. Educators should be fighting against walled gardens.

Havoc 13y ago

This must be an American thing. All the exams I have ever written (grade 1 to post grad) specified graphing calculators are prohibited. Every last one. Graphing calculators tend to be programmable and/or can save text files & local educational institutions didn't want to go there.

ibrahima 13y ago

Holy crap, I played Desolate, that game was seriously amazing for a calculator. The graphics rivaled the original Game Boy (a decade later, but still). It was seriously smooth and well made.

xlayn 13y ago

What if that liberty, that sense of discovering how to change it was not an intended side effect, and the more controlled ipad environment is? agree that exposure to that "primitive" environment and the desire to create something great would force the user to make use of ingenuity. agreed that incredibly constrained tools and no very high level language is included, yet still reducing high level problems to low level instructions can allow to discover and see something that could have been hidden by better tools. or can it be just nostalgia?

bane 13y ago

For those interested www.ticalc.org is an incredible archive dedicated to these little computers. I love TI calcs so much that the first app I install on a new phone are the TI calc emulators.

wsc981 13y ago

When I read about the language TI-BASIC in the above article, it reminded me of my old TI-99/4A computer[0], which I got from my dad to learn programming. This computer also included a TI-BASIC language, I wonder if they are in any way related, except of course from being a BASIC language created by Texas Instruments. It would be cool if old TI-99/4A games would be playable on "modern" TI graphic calculators. I still have two TI-99/4A computers in my cellar, for nostalgic reasons :) [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

Graphic calculators are totally obsolete now. You could run circles around it with a Nintendo DS with homebrew, Sony hand held consoles and of course the Ipad, Iphone or Android. But don't expect to convince your 50-60 year old teachers in University to let you use it. In spite of showing the apps that I had done for structural analysis in my Nintendo DS, they could not let me use it, I had to buy one of those stupid, overpriced, obsolete graphic calculators.

drdaeman 13y ago

I don't see any competition at programmable calculator's market. Why noone gets a modern SoC, connects it to a modern OLED display (but keep hardware keyboard, please), burns in basic DirectFB-based GNU userland with tons of readily available free science (not only math) and programming tools, designs an basic UI over the thing (most hard part), keeps the POSIX shell available and device completely unlocked, and starts selling the product? I do believe there are parents who would like their kid to have a good calculator to aid in the school, but don't want them to have an iOS/Android tablet (as it's more likely the kid will end up playing or using it for social networks). I mean, replace everything that sucks about graphing calculators - outdated (and seriously overpriced) hardware and limited programming and debugging functionality (if you're about to argue - please compare TI calculator to your development workstation to see what I mean), but keep the device feel generally science- rather than entertainment-oriented? In short: a handheld device with a general feel of modern programmable calculator, with (preinstalled) Maxima, Octave, PHYSICA, R, Python, Racket and so on under the hood, and without any [readily available] "app store" full of games. Or such products do exist, but I just haven't stumbled on anything like this?

rdl 13y ago

What we really need is HyperCard for the iPad, ideally with a Parse-like service to let you easily write network code, not crappy TI-Basic.