Hackers Bring Tetris and 3D Graphing to Casio Prizm

By Tech Powered Dad | April 18, 2012

I must admit that I’m not that good at keep up to date with the active community of graphing calculators hackers. I was interested to learn via an email update from the Cemetech staff that they have made significant inroads in their efforts to pimp out the Casio Prizm over the last couple of months.

As Texas Instruments has continues to make the TI-Nspire line their premiere line of calculators, the hacker community has started to gain interest in the Casio Prizm, calculator that seems to generally be seen as more friendly to programming efforts. Casio seems to be gaining a reputation as being less concerned about locking down their calculators than Texas Instruments

The first addition to the Casio Prizm (review), is the Tetris, long the game that has been the standard for determining if a calculator is ready for “prime time” gaming (and by prime time, I mean study hall). I’ve posted the video of this below. I have to say that Tetrizm, as it is officially named, looks really well polished for a first release, with great use of color and graphics in general.

On a more serious note for teachers and students, these devs have also given the Prizm the ability to graph in 3D. This is a really nice capability, especially when you consider that the TI-Nspire has had 3D-graphing capabilities since OS 3.0 was released last spring. Check out these great screen caps from Cemetech:

Credit to both of these hacks goes to “Kerm Martian” and “tifreak8x.” To learn more about the work being done by the programmer community on the Casio Prizm, you can visit their Prizm wiki site.

STEM careers are the future. Will you be ready?

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