TI-84 Plus C SE Math Games: Decimal Defender and 2048
Published by KermMartian | Discuss this article

After initial displeasure about the marriage of a high-resolution color screen with a 15MHz z80 CPU and no graphics coprocessor, the community has embraced the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. The first shell for the TI-84+CSE was released the same Back-to-School season that the calculator was available in stores, and games from a space shooter to Tetris to classic puzzle games. Graphing calculators are originally educational tools, so it stands to reason that some math and logic games would provide a good mix of education and entertainment for students. To that end, Cemetech's skilled members have been working on a variety of math games for the the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. One is Decimal Defender, inspired by a TI App of the same name. The remaining three are versions of the virally-popular 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli for the color and monochrome TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus calculators.

The original Decimal Defender was a "concept" game from TI Education to teach an intuitive understanding of scientific notation and powers of ten. The game challenges you to solve math problems by placing a decimal point. You are asked to divide or multiply a number by a power of ten, and you need to use your spaceship to shoot a decimal point into the proper place. You get two lives; solve the math problem incorrectly twice and the game ends. You get points based on how fast you answer the questions, and although you can choose to solve only multiplication or only division problems, you get more points when you solve both. A demo mode is included where the calculator will play the game for you to show you how it works. It of course requires Doors CSE 8.0 or higher, and Decimal Defender Color 1.0 is available in the Cemetech Archives.

The Javascript game 2048 has, in the past week, become nearly as popular among the intellectual crowd as the infamous Flappy Bird did among iDevice owners, so it should come as no surprise that it is already available in three calculator versions, with at least two more on the way. The goal of the game is to combine tiles displaying powers of 2 to get to a 2048 tile. You can move all the tiles on the board in one of the four cardinal directions in each turn, and tiles with the same value that slide into each other will combine to a new tile with double the value. The original game was created in Javascript by by Gabriele Cirulli, itself based on "1024" by Veewo Studio and "Threes" by Asher Vollmer. The three existing calculator versions are Calc2048 - Tile Sliding Game for monochrome calculators and Calc2048 Color for the TI-84+CSE, both by UnknownLoner, and 2048 Color for DCSE by Kerm Martian. TIFreak8x and geekboy are both working on potential future 2048 versions.

If you own a TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus or TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, you should try these educational math games out as soon as possible. If you're a programmer, why not think about some educational games of your own that you could create?

Downloads
Decimal Defender Color 1.0
Calc2048 - Tile Sliding Game for TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus
2048 Color for DCSE
Calc2048 Color



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