TI Education is capitalizing on the success of the STEM Behind Hollwood initiative for the TI-Nspire (which we were thrilled to port to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and hope to bring to the TI-84 Plus CE) with a new series of activities, STEM Behind Health. Created in partnership with Sanford Health, "[these] STEM lessons task students with making life-or-death decisions for real patients suffering from real diseases." The first activity in the series, currently available for the TI-Nspire CX, challenges students to help a nursing student manage diabetes and search for a cure to the disease. According to TI, "[s]ubsequent activities will explore breast cancer and the genetics of rare disease." We're always excited to get students excited about STEM, and we of course love using graphing calculators as more than just calculators, so we applaud this new initiative to combine fun STEM activities and graphing calculators in the classroom. We look forward to following STEM Behind Health's future developments, and perhaps bringing these activities to the TI-84 Plus family.

In other news, the TI-84 Plus CE continues to make its way from Texas Instruments, to distributors, and thence to teachers and students (and us). We have received word that as more users get their hands on it, a bug has been discovered in the hibernate (deep sleep) functionality. We first heard about this feature when we interviewed Dr. Peter Balyta, President of TI Education, about the new calculator. It's intended to ensure that if the TI-84 Plus CE is left alone for a long period of time, say over summer vacation, it won't have a depleted battery when you go to use it in the fall. Cemetech user calc84maniac received a note from Underwood Distributing, and we have followed up with Texas Instruments. Their comment on the matter: We'll keep you posted on this issue and let you know when the new operating system version is available, for those of you who already have TI-84 Plus CEs.

Downloads and More Information
TI-84 Plus CE Operating System downloads (fix not yet available)
STEM Behind Health information and activities

*bump* Impressive, the caring value for this topic seems shockingly low. However, TI has let me know that the OS version with this fix (5.0.1.0012, for the curious), is now available for download:

http://education.ti.com/en/us/software/details/en/158B7669E4C0493A84D33D9A22FDBD3C/ti-84plusceoperatingsystem

I also hear that OS 5.1 will be coming out in the relatively near future (likely by or before September) containing other assorted bugfixes, so I can only hope that some of the issues in our Big Bad Bundle of TI-OS 4.x Bugs that found their way into 5.0 will be fixed as well.

I am waiting for the CE to be delivered from Bach Company, hopefully before June. At the time of ordering it, which was late April, the CE was recalled because the stock Bach had the OS prior to the fix.

Yep, I think almost every calculator that went out to distributors before May had OS 5.0.0.89, which had the bug, apparently. To my knowledge, no one in the community has done a diff of the OSes to figure out what exactly had been wrong with the old version, but it sounds like there was a potential to brick a calculator that went into the deep sleep mode. I hope your CE arrives soon!

Thanks!

*bump* I actually encountered the deep sleep bug with my own calculator, and the following steps were successful in fixing my TI-84 Plus CE that wouldn't turn on (thanks to our friends at TI for sending this link):
https://epsstore.ti.com/OA_HTML/csksxvm.jsp?nSetNumber=37115

Did you upgrade the OS of your CE?

Leigh, yes, I then upgraded the OS after I rescued it. I don't know why I didn't perform the upgrade when I first wrote this article; that was a serious oversight on my part.

Whew! no worries. Glad it's operational now!