Scratch

amcerbu wrote:

As many of you know, most Texas Instruments (TI) calculators support programming in a language called "TI-BASIC", which can be used to write and run programs on the calculator.  Like Scratch, it is an interpreted language, rather than a compiled language (C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Java, Objective-C, and most others).  TI-BASIC also has performance limitations because it is interpreted, and therefore is not suitable for complex or high-performance programs. 

This year, my school required that I upgrade from a TI-84 to a TI-89 for my math class.  I found a piece of software (an IDE and compiler) that allows you to write programs in C on a computer, compile them, and download them to a TI-89 series calculator.  The programs run incredibly fast, even on a 15 MHz calculator processor (to give you an idea, most modern computer processors run at 1 - 3 GHz = 1000 - 3000 MHz).  Unfortunately, I don't know of a similar compiler software for TI-84, although I'm sure something exists if you look around. 

Anyway, if anyone is interested in learning C for writing calculator applications, you can find the website here..  I would recommend following the instructions for installation on the first tutorial (Lesson 1: A Classic "Hello World" Example) of this site.  Be aware that you need to have GTK+ installed before you can use TiEmu if you intend to debug programs on your computer, which is advised, since it is very easy to crash the calculator. 

Anyway, I hope this is helpful.  We can also discuss TI-BASIC programming here, since I've been working and programming on a TI-84 for 3 years now and I'm pretty comfortable with the language.

Awesome! I literally just received a TI-84 (blue one) for my seventh grade honors class in my private school. TI-89's are pretty advanced....why is your school letting you upgrade? TI-84's are the highest edition you can use in the SAT and most math tests......the TI-89's would do most of the work for you!

@birdybyte : Not really. 

I got my first "real" programming experience in TI-BASIC, but it takes too long to search through all the functions to program it without a real text editor on a computer.

Firedrake969 wrote:

Does the TI nspire cx allow programming?

It should.

Also, I wonder if it is considered "legal" to have TI-BASIC macros programmed to automatically calculate things like the Pythagorean theorem or other more complex formulas. It is technically doing the work for you but you made it. 

16Skittles wrote:

Firedrake969 wrote:

Does the TI nspire cx allow programming?

It should.

Also, I wonder if it is considered "legal" to have TI-BASIC macros programmed to automatically calculate things like the Pythagorean theorem or other more complex formulas. It is technically doing the work for you but you made it. 

  Well who is ever going to find out?
It would be pretty easy to put that together.

Heck, the N-Spire has Lua? That's a real scripting language, not just some proprietary system like TI-BASIC. 

I loved programming my TI84 before I got Scratch and VB. I still do when I don't have my computer    Ackermann function and 3D grapher are some of the things I've made.

Yeah, the TI-83 and TI-84 are practically the same calculator, except for a few minor hardware and operating system differences.  You can write some versatile programs on there, regardless of the super-slow processing speed.  I made Snake for TI-84 a while back.

amcerbu wrote:

Yeah, the TI-83 and TI-84 are practically the same calculator, except for a few minor hardware and operating system differences.  You can write some versatile programs on there, regardless of the super-slow processing speed.  I made Snake for TI-84 a while back.

Snake? I seem to recall my attempts always turning out too slow to be playable, so nice job! Programming those always kept me busy while bored out of my mind in class. I even made an analog clock and a course schedule program to keep track of time and tell me exactly how much time was left in the period. Unfortunately, most of those have since fallen victim to accidental RAM wipes and end-of-school returns. (My school issues us TI-84/89's for our classes.)

I have my brother's TI-84 at home, but at school, the most I can do when bored is make the most advanced Press = to increase your score games. (hey, I even made a technique for saving your score to the calculator's memory.).

Oh, and trick classmates into pressing M+ so I can make it seem like I can read their mind when they enter a number into the calculator, then clear the screen.