Today was the first day of the annual T3 conference here in Philadelphia. Texas Instruments is really playing up the fact that this is the 25th year for the conference, from highlighting teachers who have been at T3 from the beginning to offering $25 off the new TI-Nspire app this weekend. It is pretty crazy to think they’ve been at this since the late 1980’s, especially considering where calculator technology was at that time.
While it’s no secret that Texas Instruments has a new TI-84 Plus C Color graphing calculator coming out later this spring, they are finally making an official announcement to the press soon. A few hours from now, TI will distribute the press release that follows about what we can expect on the new TI-84 Plus C. If you have been following this story on Tech Powered Math, you are largely familiar with the overall story.
Texas Instruments has launched a new website for the TI-84 Plus C. While they have yet to have links to it from their main site, you can check out the TI-84 Plus C site here. There are a few new tidbits there including the now firm hardware specs for those that are curious. You’ll also find a gallery of photos of the 84C, comparison chart of TI’s most popular models, the TI-84+ and TI-Nspire CX with the new TI-84+ C, and an FAQ section.
Casio’s fx-CP400 Yesterday, Casio made a big announcement that it was continuing a trend of upgrading an existing graphing calculator line to color with a new ClassPad model. The Casio ClassPad 330 will no longer be the premier (and only) touchscreen graphing calculator on the market. A new model, the fx-CP400, will take its place at the top of the touchscreen hill. The color calculator trend is one that Casio kicked off two years ago when the Prizm was announced, moving beyond their fx-9860 GII.
UPDATE: If you are interested in the TI-84 Plus C, please check out my TI-84+C Review. I was fortunate to receive a pre-release device from TI for review purposes. After word broke last week of a possible new graphing calculator from Texas Instruments, I reached out to TI, asking if they’d be willing to make any on the record comment about the rumors. Today, I heard from Texas Instruments Digital Content Manager Dale Philbrick, who gave me the first official public comments from Texas Instruments about their new device, the TI-84+ C graphing calculator.
Far from a hoax, the TI-84 Plus C is a real calculator. Check out my TI-84 Plus CE Review. UPDATE: 11:55 a.m. I have been contacted by a source who has worked for Texas Instruments and has asked to remain anonymous. He has provided credible information that the TI-84+ C Silver Edition is, in fact, a real calculator in development by Texas Instruments. You can see the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition information request form here.
I wanted to give a shout out for a new project by Christopher Mitchell, or Kerm Martian as he’s known online. Mitchell is the man behind Cemetech, a site devoted to programming graphing calculators. He does magical things with graphing calculators, finding ways to use them that the engineers at Texas Instruments and Casio surely never expected them to be used. If you’ve followed Tech Powered Math for a while, you may remember my stories about some of Mitchell’s achievements, including Doom on the TI-Nspire and turning the TI-84+ into a web browser.
UPDATE: A couple of days after this post originally went up, I was made aware of a new hack that deserved inclusion on this list, expanding it to a top 6. Probably every single student (and just about every teacher) who has picked up a graphing calculator has asked themselves how far the technology can be pushed. What are the limits of a graphing calculator? Without much encouragement from Texas Instruments (actually quite the opposite), a dedicated hacker community has developed over the last few decades to attempt to answer this question.
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.
Kind of a random post here, but I spent Tuesday at a pre-AP Calculus workshop hosted at Triton College in River Grove, IL. My school added AP Calculus a year ago. Obviously, we have been slow to the Advanced Placement party (not sure why the hesitation—definitely not coming from the math department). As a Pre-Calculus teacher, I was very interested to see what sorts of topics the College Board would emphasize in a Pre-AP conference.
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