I continue to work my way through TI's five existing STEM Behind Hollywood activities for the TI-Nspire from TI Education, porting them to the trusty TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition platform. I started with Earth Impact!, which was tested by TI Education president Peter Balyta himself, then created Zombie Apocalypse Part I. Earlier this week, I released Zombie Apocalypse Part II, the most in-depth of the activities so far. Although I'm very concerned that the TI-84 Plus CE may render my work on the STEM Behind Hollywood activities moot, I am nevertheless pressing on with Body of Evidence, an activity that teaches forensics.

The amount of effort to complete this activity appears commensurate with Zombie Apocalypse Part II. There are complex image pages, simulations, and bar graphs. I have transcribed the first dozen text pages into my activity, created the title screen and one of the other image pages, and have begun designing the simulations in the activity. I plan to work on the first simulation next, as that's the next unfinished page in my activity. In addition, I will of course have to re-write the Student Guide and Teacher Notes documents that are distributed along with this activity.

I'm excited to bring this activity to teachers and students who use the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators in their classroom, and as always, I'll be keeping this topic updated while I develop this new activity.

Those sceenies are looking fancy already! Good luck, and hopefully one-to-one compatibility exists!

Thank you! My goal was to finish all five existing STEM Behind Hollywood activities before T^3 2015, so I could show them off there and perhaps even teach a session about using them in the classroom, but I'll see how the rest of my life schedule cooperates.

I worked on the painstaking process of trimming the diagrams of the five stages of decomposition used in the decomposition simulation from the TI-Nspire activity tonight. I checked the Lua source of the original activity to make sure I was getting the correct numbers for the simulation parameters' effects on the simulation outcome, and implemented the skeleton (no pun intended) of the sim. On the left, selecting the environmental conditions. On the right, running the simulation. Sorry, no maggots, blowflies, or odors yet.

Looks like you've got quite the fantastic start already! Excellent work so far, sir!

This reminds me of a project I did with my 7th grade science class. Great to see more SBH (our beloved acronym) projects being made!

Oh, that looks neat! I have one question about functionality though: So when you swap the background's color, is that done using both sides of GRAM, or is it done by some other means? Thanks in advance!

I appreciate it! Your screenshots made it much, much easier for me to get motivated to start this.
Oh? I'd be curious to hear more about this project, regardless of whether it incorporated any calculator technology. Thanks again for getting the ball rolling with the STEM Behind Hollywood ports in the first place with your contest entry!
Up until this evening, no. I simply draw a new background color over the whole (off-screen) half of the GRAM, draw the image and text on top, then swap which half of the GRAM is on-screen. In my previous simulations, I continued to avoid needing to use both sides of the GRAM by changing the on-screen GRAM to be the one xLIBC was drawing to. Thus, although all changes show up instantaneously, there's no need to update both halves. However, that looked too messy with this simulation, as the odors, maggots, and blowflies would gradually draw on top of the corpse and then blink out of existence for the next frame. Therefore, for this sim, I wait until the user chooses a temperature and humidity and presses PLAY, then copy the base interface to both sides of the GRAM before the sim starts. Then, I can keep swapping back and forth, and the interface around the corpse will remain the same. Here's a demo that should make it clearer:

Pretty morbid project, but looking fantastic as usual .

You're on fire at the moment, Kerm!

Thank you. I choose to see it as an interesting and vital branch of science, if as you say, a bit morbid.
Ahhh, it burns! Quick, someone put me out! Thank you, sir.

I have finished the simulation, including the legend, and managed to shave another 3KB off of the image data in the data file to boot.

That is incredible! I'd dare say it seems better than the Nspire one But I might be biased.

Thank you. I feel it's a little more refined, but I too am very biased, and I do of course salute the hard-working teachers and engineers who put together the TI-Nspire activities.

I have completed the two graph pages that immediately follow the simulation. The first graph shows the number of stages spent in each stage for the temperature and humidity chosen in the simulation. The second graph shows the total decomposition time for all eight possible combinations of temperature and humidity.

Wow! That is some quick progress! Great work; I may have to learn more about these hybrid basic libs!

Thanks a lot! I must drop all the hybrid library credit squarely on tr1p1ea for thinking hard about what would provide the best balance between the four competing needs of power, simplicity, speed, and size in what hybrid BASIC programmers can do and how they can do it. I am happy to be speeding along on this activity.

Three more text pages added, one with an image (something new for my activities' text pages). As you can see, after the first pass, there is often significant refinement to do, like the "simulation" that has a tokenized mu in it on the Q5 page.

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*bump* I'm only about an hour early on this bump, so I think I can live with myself. Between last night and this morning, I managed to finish all of the remaining text and image pages, thus essentially completing the activity. I spent HCWP this evening writing the student handout, and I'll be working on the teacher notes next. I plan to do one round of testing on my own physical calculator next, then release a beta at some point tomorrow. May I count on you excellently helpful ladies and gents for some quick beta-testing so I might release this by Friday?

Sure, I can test it, but I doubt I'll find anything too horrendous. Nice work on getting all that done so quickly! Can't wait to give it a shot; I don't own an nSpire so I've never tried the original.

If you use it as if you were a student and actually try to solve the mystery, you might find mistakes I made (or, hopefully, no mistakes ), but that's an imposition on your time.

Beta-testing time for anyone who has the inclination and opportunity! Please run the activity, see what happens, see what breaks, and let me know if you spot errors in the student and teacher PDFs. Thanks in advance for your collective invaluable help.

Download
[Beta] Body of Evidence Activity for TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition

A couple bugs that I encountered; not sure if you had any of them:

1) Page with officer: "So how are we going to figure out when the victim died?"
::PostMortem might be Post Mortem?

2) Page 17: Q5
::Question should have a question mark.


3) Page 19: Q7
:: "which would" doesn't sound quite right.

4) Perhaps the controls in the help menu could be all first letter caps? Or lowercase, which ever one looks better. As of right now, it's both.

It looks great though! Nice job Kerm!

This looks great!

I have seen PostMortem (I assume this is to indicate the abbreviation.), post-mortem, postmortem, and post mortem in the program and the PDFs. Which one will you use?

On page 19: "el- element"

I see that the readme was copied. It has the title of your past project: Zombie Apocalypse Part 2.

This isn't too major but the DoorsCSE screenshots in the PDFs are outdated. BODYEVDC is shown as 7062 bytes when it is really 7049 bytes. However, the memory menu reads as 7066 bytes.

All fixed!
Ah, nice catch.
I appreciate the compliment and the help!
Thank you.
postmortem and PostMortem, the latter in the one place the abbreviation is defined. Thanks for catching those.
Fixed.
Facepalm.
You're right about that, but I'm not going to worry about it.

Thank you so much for testing, guys! I just ran one final test on my own physical calculator, and everything checked out. I'll be releasing it later tonight or tomorrow morning.