On Wednesday October 21st, Texas Instruments published a set of online tutorials for the TI-84 Plus CE and CSE called TI Codes to help students and teachers get into TI-BASIC programming. These tutorials essentially start students in a position of just getting their shiny new graphing calculator, and having never been exposed to any programming language previously.
This approach seems to work well enough, and they start the reader out learning how to create new programs, and how to edit them. From there, they transition to teaching the I/O commands, variables, loops, conditionals, and graphics aspects of the language. Each section, called units, then has various skill building sets and an assignment to generally guide the reader towards a goal, without giving them all the code necessary to complete the task, leaving it to the reader to figure out.
Once they've gone through the basics, they can go onto some more advanced tutorials, written up by our very own Christopher Mitchell(KermMartian)! He covers a few, slightly more advanced topics, like creating a guessing game, creating event loops, and making a snake game.
For you teachers, you have access to the lessons, downloadable resources, and a mailing list to join to get the latest updates about the TI BASIC language.
While this is a great resource to get students on the path to programming and possibly building them up to a fantastic career, the tutorials themselves are merely the first step into a much broader range of usage for the language, and only covers a small fraction of the commands.
TI is hosting a webinar covering the TI Codes tutorials on November 10th, and the speaker is none other than the man who wrote the "10 Minutes of Code" activities, T^3 instructor John Hanna. Attending this webinar gives you a chance to win tickets to attend the T3 International Conference. Register for this event here.
If you make it through those tutorials and have more questions you can't find answered in TI Codes, make sure to ask around on the forums!
More Information
TI Codes website
TI-BASIC Webinar on November 10, 2015.
This approach seems to work well enough, and they start the reader out learning how to create new programs, and how to edit them. From there, they transition to teaching the I/O commands, variables, loops, conditionals, and graphics aspects of the language. Each section, called units, then has various skill building sets and an assignment to generally guide the reader towards a goal, without giving them all the code necessary to complete the task, leaving it to the reader to figure out.
Once they've gone through the basics, they can go onto some more advanced tutorials, written up by our very own Christopher Mitchell(KermMartian)! He covers a few, slightly more advanced topics, like creating a guessing game, creating event loops, and making a snake game.
For you teachers, you have access to the lessons, downloadable resources, and a mailing list to join to get the latest updates about the TI BASIC language.
While this is a great resource to get students on the path to programming and possibly building them up to a fantastic career, the tutorials themselves are merely the first step into a much broader range of usage for the language, and only covers a small fraction of the commands.
TI is hosting a webinar covering the TI Codes tutorials on November 10th, and the speaker is none other than the man who wrote the "10 Minutes of Code" activities, T^3 instructor John Hanna. Attending this webinar gives you a chance to win tickets to attend the T3 International Conference. Register for this event here.
If you make it through those tutorials and have more questions you can't find answered in TI Codes, make sure to ask around on the forums!
More Information
TI Codes website
TI-BASIC Webinar on November 10, 2015.