We tend to focus on TI Education's technology and educational mission (and the equally fascinating calculators produced by their competitors), but every once in a while we need to turn our attention to the company itself. After twenty years with TI Education, Melendy Lovett is retiring, having served as President of the educational division for a decade. As announced by Texas Instruments a few days ago and simultaneously shared with us, Peter Balyta, Ph.D. will be stepping up to President of TI Education from his previous position as Executive Director of Worldwide Marketing & Product Strategy. Two Cemetech administrators had the pleasure of meeting both Ms. Lovett and Dr. Balyta last year in Philadelphia at the T^3 2013 conference, and the Cemetech staff would like to express the best wishes to both. We thank Ms. Lovett for her years of dedication, without which many of the devices that have made our educational and not-so-educational projects may not have existed. In addition, the many thousands or tens of thousands of students who learned to program with graphing calculators and later pursued STEM fields as a result of this passion may have taken different paths. At the same time, we wish to congratulate Dr. Balyta on his new position, and we will be very interested to see where TI Education will go from here.

Although we here at Cemetech have a deep-seated love for physical graphing calculators, many believe that they will evolve significantly over the coming years, a change heralded by the Casio Prizm, TI-Nspire, and HP Prime. Some even go as far as to prophesy the demise of the dedicated graphing calculator, claiming that smartphones and tablets will replace them in the classroom and on standardized tests. No matter what the future of graphing calculators may hold, we will follow with rapt attention, and we look forward to see what hand Dr. Balyta will have in this evolution. We will try to get a statement from Dr. Balyta at T^3 2014 in Las Vegas, though we're sure that TI and its competitors have ideas for the future that will stay under wraps for the time being.

Once again, our appreciation two decades of dedication to Ms. Melendy Lovett, and the best of luck in his new role to Dr. Peter Balyta.


Melendy Lovett (left) and Peter Balyta

If you manage to talk to him, I'd be interested to know about his background and his ideal direction for the company.

Definitely, I'll try to get you answers to those questions. You'll note he's a Ph.D. (like I hope to be, if I could only finish the research I need to complete my thesis!), so as an escapee from academia, I'd imagine he'll bring a new perspective to the role.

You forgot to mention that even more projects would have existed if the Nspire series wasn't a closed platform with custom protocols (at least, it has some GPIO on the dock connector with a weird pitch), and if the TI-Z80 and TI-68k series weren't so underpowered and standalone (limited I/O, custom protocols)

TI is still actively fighting hobbyists on the flagship model (and have the upper hand at it most of the time), and TI is so well entrenched on the education markets of multiple countries that nobody can make a significant dent in TI's market share, even with technically superior models.
No _compelling_ reason to change a lose-lose policy, even with a different person at the helm... IOW, I expect no change in the direction of users - but as usual, I'd love to be proved wrong

It seems unlikely that there will not be a point where the tablet pervades all aspects of our lives. I see a graphing App or emulation as becoming the norm: in fact it makes sense. The closed "eco-system" of Apple, for example, as mentioned by Kerm in a previous thread, will compliment TI's philosphy and will satisfy educational testing requirements for sure.
As a counterpoint observation - does Melendy Lovett not look too young to retire

I thought Nikky and Ryan were next in line for this job.

i have hopeful wishes that the new head will take TI education on a growing curve, and that it continues to expand. however, i also wish that they would get some frickin competition, because thats when technology develops best.with a freindly competitor.

The HP Prime is an extremely capable calculator, and the Casio Prizm led the charge of color-screen graphing calculators, but for better or worse, TI still dominates the US education market. At this rate, I suspect that's unlikely to change, between teachers being comfortable with TI's technology and TI offering a great deal of professional development opportunities.

Yeah, the organization of the education market is such that basically nothing can make a significant dent into TI's market share... not even the technically superior Prime (slightly hampered by having less RAM than a CX, and more significantly hampered by the young and relatively more buggy OS), let alone the fx-CP400 crap.

I think that the only Casio calc to ever have managed to compete against TI calcs were the Graph 100+ and 85 series in France, although the former is pretty much gone since it is discontinued. The PRIZM is almost dead in France, but the 85 is still thriving. Other than that, in the rest of the world Casio barely even has a market share.

I would argue, based on Cemetech site traffic, that the Prizm is huge in Portugal, and a significant force in Germany and a few other European nations as well. For example, Flappy Bird for the Casio Prizm has already jumped to over a thousand downloads in about two weeks.

Thank you very much!

This is hugely download in 2 weeks!