I never cease to be amazed by the ingenuity of the Texas Instruments hacker/programmer community. TechCrunch is reporting the release of a web browser for the TI-83/TI-84 family of graphing calculators. This is far from an official Texas Instruments release. Chris Mitchell, “KermMartian,” a Ph.D. student at NYU, has named his creation Gossamer. This a text based browser on the order of Lynx, if any of you can remember that far back.
Wolfram is on fire. While the company behind Mathematica has been a presence in high level mathematical circles for over a decade, Wolfram’s flurry of activity over the last year or so has been truly amazing. First came a mobile version of Wolfram Alpha, their popular web application, followed shortly by the Wolfram course assistant apps. Now comes the release of a new document format, the Computational Document Format or CDF.
NPR put up a nice podcast on Weekend Edition this past Saturday about Leonardo da Pisa’s (aka Fibonacci) “Book of Calculation.” Most of us are familiar with Fibonacci’s famous sequence of numbers that became known as the Fibonacci numbers, where any number in the sequence after the first two is found by adding the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … I have to admit, I wasn’t aware until I heard this podcast what an impact Fibonacci had on the ability of regular people to do arithmetic.
Visit the Virtual Nerd website to subscribe. While I was at the NCTM annual meeting in Indianapolis, I saw a whole host of online math programs touted as a way to improve student learning. There was one that stood out, Virtual Nerd. Once I saw it in action, I knew I had to do a Virtual Nerd Review. Virtual Nerd is free for teachers, so I recently signed up for a free teacher account myself to review Virtual Nerd’s features in more depth.
It was announced that yesterday that Casio has named Clemson as its Center of Academic Training. Dr. Bob Horton will oversea Clemson’s involvement in the center. I got to meet “Dr. Bob” at the NCTM annual meeting in Indianapolis. He’s been very involved with Casio for years and could be described as a “Casio guru,” as both an advocate of and an expert in the use of Casio calculators in the classroom.
If this is your first trip to the site since the re-launch, welcome to Tech Powered Math “2.0”. It was about this time last year that I launched Tech Powered Math. What a wonderful first year it turned out to be to launch a math technology site. I was writing about the TI-84 vs. the TI-Nspire when Casio changed the game by announcing their Prizm, the world’s first color graphing calculator.
The 2011 NCTM annual meeting is over, and I have arrived back home in Illinois. Sorry it took me a while to get this post up, but the return trip took most of Saturday. Indianapolis was a great choice for the convention. It’s so easy to move around downtown via their system of skybridges that allow you to walk for blocks at a time without ever being exposed to bad weather.
Another day has come and gone at NCTM, and frankly, I’m beat. I’ve been on my feet for the better part of two days. I’m looking forward to a little shut eye tonight. Tomorrow is a short day, so I’m planning to sleep in a little later. Today, TI talks to me about the CX, Super Mario Bros disappointments, a search for geometry books, and the Casio booth is hot.
Day two of the NCTM conference in Indianapolis has come and gone. For me, day two was marked by the incredible battle of the Prizm and TI-Nspire CX displays as well as learning about geometry software for the classroom and a number of cool new websites. Battle of the Booths Well if you had any doubt that Casio and Texas Instruments were taking this whole Prizm vs. Nspire CX thing seriously, one look at their booths in the exhibition hall would remove it.
Day one at the annual NCTM meeting in Indianapolis is in the books. It was definitely challenging to get here as all roads leading to Indy are apparently ripped to shreds right now. It seemed like no matter what Google Maps tried to get me here, I ran into another closed road or on ramp. At one point, I even managed to end up at the Indianapolis airport, which is nowhere near the convention.
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