At last, all five of TI Education's STEM Behind Hollywood activities for the TI-Nspire are available for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition! Over the past four months, I have been porting the exciting STEM Behind Hollywood activities to the TI-84+CSE using the Hybrid BASIC functions in Doors CSE 8, and with today's release of Science Friction for the TI-84 Plus C SE, the complete set is available for both the TI-84 Plus C SE and the TI-Nspire. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition versions replicate all the lessons about friction, forensics, anatomy, chemistry, astrophysics, gravity, and more, with engaging plots and interactive simulations for students to explore. I am thrilled to complete the set of TI-84 Plus C SE STEM Behind Hollywood activities with the release of Science Friction for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

In Science Friction, students will learn about static and kinetic friction and Newton's second and third laws of motion in this superhero-centric activity. After students get a background in how mass, normal force, and the coefficient of friction are related, they play the role of the henchperson to a villainous civil engineer trying to sabotage a new bridge. They must spray a concrete roadway with oil, water, or ice to stop the hero from saving the bridge, using their knowledge of friction to figure out the best substance to use.

Made for Doors CSE 8.1 or higher, Science Friction for the TI-84+CSE provides the same fun, real-world lessons about friction and Newton's second and third laws of motion as the TI-Nspire activity. Besides the on-calculator activity itself, it includes thorough teacher notes and a student handout, both heavily adapted from TI's original material. We would love to hear your feedback in the attached topic if you use this activity in your own classroom. We respectfully salute Texas Instruments and their hard work in creating the original material for this activity. We hope we'll have a chance to work with TI more closely as we continue to bring educational activities and programs to the ever-popular TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, and anticipate bringing STEM Behind Hollywood to the new TI-84 Plus CE as soon as our real jobs permit.

Download:
Science Friction activity for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition

Woo nice work Kerm! I was never very good at physics, so perhaps I should spend some time with this one heh

I'm sure you're shortchanging yourself on your physics skills, but I certainly hope you'd have fun going through this one anyway.

This line is probably the biggest reason the the CE edition of DoorsCSE would be good to be cross-compatible:



Great job on getting all of these finished Kerm! Now I can educate myseld!

I certainly hope so, and I hope my frustration with not having a chance to apply our expertise and aptitude at finding bugs to help them perfect this new calculator (and prepare our tools to be compatible) when other community sites have had that opportunity didn't come through too much. I'm just happy that they're all complete and available for teachers to use.

I almost feel like downloading this just to see why we're "stopping the hero from saving the day".

You should! I think that's a particularly amusing facet of the activity, and probably something that will make a lot of people try it to find out. Plus, knowing a little more physics never hurt anyone.

Kerm, great job on getting these all done! I wish i had a CSE to test these out, but after having watched your progress on these over the past few months i've finally picked the nspire files up from TI's site.

TI should really open source the z80 series, i think the community now (almost?) has a better understanding of the calcs than TI themselves

I think you're right about that. In fact, we noticed on LinkedIn that there's a guy who was responsible for helping with the TI-84+CE that includes "reverse-engineering" the variable and VAT storage of the TI-84 Plus series among his duties. They should have just asked us to help them overhaul the TI-84+CE's OS to handle the larger address space; I think we understand the OS a lot better than them indeed.

Thank you for the compliment, and if I get a chance to pass along the anecdote, I'll be happy to tell my contacts that we continue to help sell TI calculators with our (free) advertising via our projects.

Finally, although I plan to post this as an actual news post at some point, I created a short video introducing the five activities in the STEM Behind Hollywood series: