Cemetech Tools for Teachers, and Overhauled Resources
Published by KermMartian 5 years ago (2019-03-09T05:39:42+00:00) | Discuss this article

Today, we're proud to announce new resources for students and teachers at Cemetech, and a new way for all of our visitors to find the resources relevant to them. Our Resources section (previously the Tools page) has been revamped with curated sections for Teachers, Students, and Programmers. One motivator behind this overhaul was making it easier to find the sections of the site that even many long-time visitors might not have stumbled across, like SourceCoder, jsTIfied, the Learn @ Cemetech wiki, and our calculator reference pages. The second big motivation was the new Educational Projects and Lesson Plans section of our Archives.

As we've been reminded by the last two years of TI's T^3 International Conference, the company and the teachers that use its tech have gone beyond embracing programming to embracing electronics and robots, via the TI-Innovator Hub and the TI-Innovator Rover. We've also seen teachers working with VEX Robots, Raspberry Pi-connected hardware, and even the Arduino (the inspiration behind ArTICL). We noticed a big gap: there's no good online community for teachers and students to collaborate on interesting projects with electronics, hardware, and calculators together, from TI, HP, and Casio or elsewhere. Therefore, we've added this new section to the Archives, and have shifted several sections of our Forum accordingly, as an experiment to see if we can provide that community.

Over the documented life of Cemetech over the past nineteen years, we've worked to continually expand the resources that we offer and the audience that we can help. Cemetech was built on a foundation of knowledge, information, and community: a place where projects could be shared, then later where questions could be asked, and most recently where documentation and tools could be found. Notable milestones along that journey have included:
  • July 2004: A real forum, where members could converse, ask questions, and share projects, replacing a rudimentary message board.
  • April 2005: File Archives, where Cemetechians could upload programs that they created and the public could download them.
  • November 2005: SourceCoder, Cemetech's online TI-BASIC editor and IDE, was first released.
  • June 2006: Cemetech starts its first programming contest, one of 21 that have been held to date.
  • October 2006: An official IRC channel, #cemetech on EfNet, was launched, linked to our in-page SAX chat system (itself introduced in May 2006.
  • October 2010: A weekly video conference called Have Calc, Will Program (HCWP) was first held, initially with a set weekly agenda, and later evolving to an informal programming and collaboration session.
  • January 2012: Development started on our jsTIfied in-browser calculator emulator.
  • March 2012: The first of three books by Christopher Mitchell, "[url=https://www.cemetech.net/news.php?year=2012&month=all&id=504]Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus, began, and was published in September.
  • August 2012: Cemetech's first annual Back-to-School Calculator Buying Guide released.
  • September 2012: Cemetech has a substantial presence at its first big event, World Maker Faire 2012 in New York City.
  • March 2013: Cemetech begins its yearly tradition of sending founder Christopher Mitchell, often with other Cemetechians, to Texas Instruments' annual T^3 Conference.
  • June 2014: The monthly Cemetech Projects of the Month (PotM) feature is first published.
This step is the latest effort to expose our tools, resources, and community to the larger community of teachers and students. Please help me welcome any newcomers into the fold!

Visit the New Sections
Cemetech Resources for Teachers, Students, and Programmers
Educational Projects and Lesson Plans files and downloads



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