By Tech Powered Dad | June 7, 2012
In the first major update to the TI-Nspire operating system since OS 3.0 came out a year ago in the Spring of 2011, Texas Instruments today released TI-Nspire OS 3.2. While less significant a leap forward than 3.0, which brought the ability to load pictures, 3D graphing, and cleared the way for the TI-Nspire CX release, 3.2 nonetheless offers important new features.
The biggest change for most users will be in graphing. Finally, we have the ability to graph conic sections and graph equations written in terms of y. I know this is something that the teachers and students in my circle have been requesting for a long time, and it is an incredibly welcome improvement.
There are a couple of other improvements that will be huge for certain audiences. First, the TI-Nspire dev team gave chemistry teachers the ability to include chemistry boxes, which make for easy inputting of chemistry symbols and equations. Specifically, I got to see them use the feature to balance chemistry equations when they demonstrated 3.2 for me earlier this spring. The other significant improvement is Lua scripting programming capabilities. While the folks at TI say they understand the average user won’t probably spend much time programming with Lua, they believe those that do will write programs that can be extremely helpful to all TI-Nspire users.
I do plan to update my YouTube tutorial on how to update your TI-Nspire OS when I get back from Honduras in a couple of weeks. I can tell you that I was able to update both my computer and handheld with only a couple of minor snags. The automatic update didn’t seem to work for either. For the Teacher Software, I uninstalled the old software and installed the new version. For the handheld, drag and dropping the new OS onto my Nspire’s name within the Teacher Software didn’t work for me. I had to right click on the Nspire and select “Install handheld OS.”
I’d also like to use this opportunity to tell you that I am working on an eBook for beginners on the TI-Nspire. I’ve written most of it already, but I need to make changes to reflect the menu changes in OS 3.2. It’ll be available in Kindle format for your Kindle, iPad, iPad, iPhone, Android device, or computer. I plan to have it out around the end of this month or early next month, so keep your ears open to however you follow Tech Powered Math (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
