What can I do with a talking graphing calculator?

November 28, 2018 6:49 PM

I know the general wisdom on Mefi is that graphing calculators on the whole are overpriced and easily replaced by smartphone apps, but I was just reminded of a fancy talking TI84 I have from my school days, and I wondered what kinds of cool things it might be able to do.

This calculator, was a major help to me in my college statistics course once they got the kinks ironed out. I haven't touched it in a few years but got the recent urge to update it and see what's new. I know there used to be an entire industry of graphing calculator programs around high school and such, but I could never participate because this one came on the scene a bit too late. I believe it provides me access to all the standard functions, though external programs are much more hit or miss. This isn't intended to be productive, though cool productive uses of this gadget are welcome.

posted by Alensin to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: The classic high school experience would be to play Drugwars, a text-based game programmed in TI BASIC. It's difficult to find the source code for this, due to some sort of controversy with Texas Instruments. I found something on GitHub that purports to be the source code, though I don't know if it's in a format or encoding that can easily be loaded onto the device.

Whether or not Drugwars will work, it's possible to write programs in BASIC directly on the calculator (tutorial here), though, which could be slightly amusing, if it plays well with the speech interface.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:09 PM on November 28, 2018

If you don't want to keep it, donate it to your local school district. My son's middle school uses graphing calculators starting in algebra, and the teacher has a bunch she "checks out" to students in need who can't afford their own.
posted by alathia at 2:54 PM on November 29, 2018