By Tech Powered Dad | March 5, 2012
I’m going to have stories continuing to trickle out of my time at T3 in Chicago for a while. Along with the announcement of Mayim Bialik as their new spokesperson, the folks at TI had another big announcement, TI-Nspire OS 3.2 is on the way. There are three very noteworthy improvements that come with OS 3.2.
First, graphing with conic sections is finally available. This is one of the few remaining things that was fairly simple to do on the TI-84 (via an app) but impossible on the TI-Nspire. In 3.2, graphing a conic is as simple as choosing a conic section to graph, choosing a format (factored, standard) and inputting into a template. Trace is also available.
Another great feature is the ability to graph equations in the form “x=”. This feature goes far beyond what the TI-84 could do via app, which was just a vertical line. The demo of this features included equations like x=sin(y). These equations are traceable, and you can solve for their intersection points with standard functions.
Finally, TI-Nspire OS 3.2 brings Lua scripting to the Nspire ecosystem, which will make programmers very happy. I don’t claim to fully understand Lua and its capabilities, but the demo that TI’s people showed me was pretty sweet, a physics program that allowed students to drop a skater onto a ramp and observe behavior and energy. The folks from TI told me that they only expect a small percentage of Nspire users to program with Lua, but they think a large percentage will be very interested in using the programs that are written with it.
A full video demo of TI-Nspire OS 3.2 follows below.