By Tech Powered Dad | September 27, 2012
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.
Now Mitchell is pulling back the curtain on how he does some of that magic with a new book, “Programming the TI-83+/TI-84+.” The book is now available on Amazon. From the back of the book:
The TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus are more than just powerful graphing calculators—they are the perfect place to start learning to program. The TI-BASIC language is built in, so you have everything you need to create your own math and science programs, utilities—even games.
Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus teaches universal programming concepts and makes it easy for students, teachers, and professionals to write programs for the world’s most popular graphing calculators. This friendly tutorial guides you concept-by-concept, immediately immersing you in your first programs. It introduces TI-BASIC and z80 assembly, teaches you tricks to slim down and speed up your programs, and gives you a solid conceptual base to explore other programming languages.
Most of this type of programming is way over my head, since nowadays I don’t write more than a few dozen lines of code a year. However, I know there are TPM readers that are really into programming their Texas Instruments’ calculators. If that describes you, it’s worth your time to take a look at what a Jedi Master of programming calculators like Mitchell has to say in his latest book.