Published by KermMartian 9 years, 1 month ago (2015-03-12T14:47:56+00:00) | Discuss this article

With Texas Instruments' T^3 (Teachers Teaching Technology) 2015 conference officially kicking off tomorrow, we have collected a few TI-related news items for you. Most center around the new TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator, which is due to hit stores and educational technology suppliers late this spring. We also are excited to bring you an introduction to T^3 2015 and the Cemetechians who will be attending this year.

• First, TI has announced a "Calculate Your Color" contest. This faux personality quiz asks you questions about your favorite scientists, with what graphed function you identify, and more. It chooses one of the colors of the TI-84 Plus CE that matches your personality: Original (black), Radical Red, True Blue, Silver Linings, Plum Pi (purple), Lightning (light blue), Denim (navy blue), or Positively Pink. At the end of the quiz, you have an opportunity to enter to win a TI-84 Plus CE in that color. You can take the quiz at CalculateYourColor.com.


• Of interest to our community assembly programmers is the fact that Apps and OS for the TI-84 Plus CE are now available for download. Until TI releases an assembly SDK for the new TI-84 Plus CE, ez80 assembly programmers who hope to write educational programs, games, and Apps for the calculator will have to derive the information they need from examining the existing Apps and the OS. Unfortunately, preliminary investigations indicate that the TI-84 Plus CE's Apps (.8ek files, for the curious) are signed with a 2048-bit key, which TI will have to release for the community to write Apps.


• TI has released OS 4.0 for the TI-Nspire, the first major version bump in years. It drops support for the grayscale TI-Nspire calculators, built only for the color TI-Nspire CX calculators, but includes a variety of additional features ennumerated on TI's website. The improvements include new ways to zoom and resize documents in the computer software, orthographic 3D graphing, more ways to label, measure, and select items in 2D graphs and geometry sketches, and the ability to display the R^2 (fit) value for some regressions.


• Cemetech administrator Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell will be joined at T^3 2015 in Fort Worth, Texas by accomplished developer DrDnar. At this annual conferences, teachers teach teachers how to effectively use TI's educational technology in the classroom. We have three days of exciting professional development to share with you, so keep your eyes on Cemetech's front page. In addition, Christopher will be presenting "Teaching Programming with the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus" on Saturday morning, so we're excited to further our mission of spreading graphing calculator programming as a valuable STEM skill.

Between the TI-84 Plus CE and T^3 2015, the following few days promise to bring many exciting developments that we'll be posting here as well as on Cemetech's Twitter account and Facebook page. If you aren't already following Cemetech on both mediums, you should!



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