How calculator games took over schools
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- Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
- More info and sources at bottom.
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Hey there thanks for watching, and big thanks again to the people who contributed to this.
Here are some sources - it’s a bit of a hodgepodge because, honestly, a lot of it was too niche to include in a video, but there’s a lot to dig into.
You Tube Channels:
The TI Wizard
/ @thetiwizard
Squakewars
/ @squakenet
tistory.wikidot...
Smithsonian’s calculator:
americanhistor...
An Agenda for Action:
www.nctm.org/f...
NYT about “prose of math.”
timesmachine.n...
Sample curriculum:
archive.org/de...
Wiki about the Math Wars - I was gonna include this in the calculator vid, but it is a bit broader than calculators and includes a larger scope curriculum debate.
en.wikipedia.o...
This is the paper I read about that:
www.ams.org/no...
Changes in the SAT in 1994:
www.jstor.org/...
A down and dirty retrospective on calculators in classes:
www.jstor.org/...
NYT on calcs:
timesmachine.n...
History of Demana and Waits:
www.nctm.org/G...
Vintage TI Ad:
archive.org/de...
Teacher Leader Vid:
• T³ Teacher Leader Cadr...
Icarus website:
icarus.ticalc.org/
My favorite TI History website:
tistory.wikidot...
An iconic close second (not because it’s worse, but it’s just less related to my needs doing the history stuff).
www.ticalc.org...
Longer history of entrance exams. I originally was gonna include a beat about how the College Board really called the shots here, but the infamous “AGENDA FOR ACTION” made me think that the movement was best credited to start there, and may have proceeded regardless (though the College Board doubtless could have squashed anything if they had some crazed anti-calculator radicals in charge).
www.jstor.org/...
Good synopsis of Calculator controversies. Though the sorta granular nature of the timeline (it’s cool in this test, not on this test, etc) might make clear why I paper over some specifics, since they end up leading to a similar place, but have a lot of points where I might trip into small factual errors (that, IMHO, are irrelevant to the overall point of the vid).
hackeducation....
Some of the in depth studies that made me less arrogant about this stuff:
onlinelibrary....
onlinelibrary....
onlinelibrary....
Sweeping thing about tech in Math:
www.jstor.org/...
Fun Wired story about Drug Wars and the programmer for TI:
www.wired.com/...
This channel could be renamed: old kids explain their childhoods
haha indeed!
I just got out of high school and I did this too 😂
Don't worry, Youngblood, your time will come.
If you're lucky.
Look here you little s... meh ... you're not wrong.
Highschoolers still use the ti-84 series
I made 10 or 20 bucks designing 10 levels for the Mario game on mirage.
And my calculator programming lead to my current job as web developer. In that calculator basic was transferable to excel’s scripting language also in basic, which lead me to creating internal reports with sql and web development which lead to my current role as senior web developer at a company.
This is almost my progress as well. TI BASIC->Web dev->Excel/VBA->software engineer.
And I remember the day when MirageOS was released and it was just ridiculous the amount of control we had.
I learned BASIC on an Apple //e. But I was able to use it when I had a TI-85 in Middle School. In high school I took a qbasic course as a prerequisite for a C course that was my high school course catalog but was never offered. I did learn a little more sophisticated programming though by taking is a formal class in high school and advancing beyond the self taught basic from grade school.
I could only program in ti basic. People like you were legends when I was in high school.
5:32 To avoid cheating, teachers had us reset our calculators before exams, and show them the "reset completed" screen as proof.
So obviously, someone in my class simply recreated that "reset completed" screen, and showed that instead... He's a programmer now.
Lol, I left out one anecdote about this too. I feel like I found this program as well. You have to have true guts to run that program, but the rewards were rich.
At my school, you were required to use the school's calculators on tests.
@Mike Iversen oh wow i actually understand that because i had to archive stuff making this video. genius!
That was such a thing in high school, I really only specifically remember doing it for the SAT but I’m pretty sure they must’ve made us other times. Now 6 years of college later at three different universities probably hundreds of tests I haven’t had a single person ask me to reset my calculator. Hell I had a professor that recommended or at least approved of me writing programs to solve the test problems. Double hell, I’m pretty sure that the high school thing about forcing us to reset calculators made every student hyper aware you could cheat with them. Triple hell, if you could somehow get enough notes and programs into your calculator to actually raise your SAT score any significant amount you probably earned it lol
I'm a proponent of cheating. It's a resourcefulness that employers use.
I’m old enough to remember “you’re not going to walk around with a calculator in your pocket for the rest of your life, learn how to do the math” 😂
Wasn’t that long ago, I remember hearing that in the last 5 years
Doesn't narrow it down much. People said that until about 2012 or so
"Hey, google." **points camera at math problem**
Actually, to elaborate on that a bit, I used my phone to read all the player's files in Squid Game by translating the text using google's Translate app. Not only did they not see the calculator in our future-pockets, they also missed our film and record libraries, personal translator, secretary, map collection, notepad, TV studio, game console, PC... [goes on for about 6 hours but somehow never mentions a telephone]
@@BaronVonQuiply Facts lol Gotta love having the worlds wealth of information in your pocket.
I programmed my entire 9th grade geometry book into my calculator. Was in a class with kids older than me and sold them it for $5 a piece lol. Was super easy to use, you would just select the chapter and the formula needed, plug-in the variables you were given and out came your answer. Came back to bite me on the SAT later when I couldn’t remember any geometry haha 😂
Totally agree, let kids program and create. I learned more math through programming than I ever did through lectures anyways.
What if the kids don't like to program and create and learn better using lectures? Will they be left behind those that do in replacing one global method of teaching by another?
@@Game_Herolectures aren't phased out. Hell, textbooks have lecture videos nowadays so even if the professor or teacher doesn't lecture, they still have the textbook's resources.
I made some physics programs like that. I don’t know if it should count as cheating, because in the process of writing and testing the programs, I ended up learning the material.
Programming led me to self teach myself trig and basic calc as a freshman
I may or may not have done something similar.
I remember buying my TI-92 in 1996. Teacher thought it was just like the TI-85 or other calculators. The thing is however the TI-92 could do calculus. Let just say I did well in my calc class. 😂
I remember seeing one of those back in high school and thinking how really cool it was. Shame how even the TI-92 plus version got discontinued (as was the graphing calculator I used, the TI-86).
@@MaverickChristian speaking of the 92+, I ended up buying the plus upgrade for my ti-92. It was just a chip you could replace.
it was huge! A full keyboard lol. Only one kid in my engineering college had one. I'm jealous.
My TI-89 was similar. I used to love writing stuff for that. For some reason though my initial obsession was trying to port this programming language APL over to the calculator as a teen. Totally failed though.
An American transfer student at my University in the UK had one. We were amazed to see it as we'd only ever seen it in a catalogue before.
I was one of the only people at my high school who would track down games online and load them onto my calculator, so I have such fond memories of people seeing them and saying "you gotta give me that one!" and watching them spread across the school. Such good times.
I just started high school and ever one just has a basic casio that has no hack ability and I'm just sitting there with a full coloured back light ti nspire cx😅 with doom and gba
Cool video!
FYI I made the game shown at 0:29 (Desolate) in 2003 and still dabble in calculator programming today :).
You may find that many professional programmers started their journey with calculators.
bravo!!
Oh hey tr1p! Long time no see! How’s it going?
@@cdigames Hey mate! I'm going good thanks, getting old lol. How about yourself?
definitely, i started coding on a TI-84, now im doing a computer science degree :)
@@tr1p1ea Oh big same. Still working on that Metroid game in BASIC I was poking at, though my 84SE is long since lost. I still hang out with ajanata though, can you believe it?
One of the most popular programs on my school was a Casio Basic program that (almost) pixel perfectly recreated the receipt screen saying the memory had been wiped. I think there was one corner that wasn't possible to draw on (because that's where the progress indicator was) that would tell the screens apart, but no teacher knew about it. We mostly used it just to avoid having to delete our games rather than for cheating... After all we were allowed a formula leaflet and a calculator so there was very limited what we could put into a calculator that would be any more helpful.
1990s, teachers fear their students using calculator. Now, teachers fear their students using ChatGPT.
90s kid here. There was totally a drive to get us to not use calculators when we took the SAT, even though we HAD to use them every day in all our math classes. I went to a college prep school and funnily enough, I got higher scores on the PSAT *after* I (voluntarily) stopped using a calculator.
I am so glad I graduated this year.. because you know no teachers are going to think twice if an "AI detector" flags something you send in as generated.. despite them being extremely innacurate
I just want to say that chat GPT gets answers to math problems wrong. But it looks like it's getting them right. I'm helping a student right now with two of her courses and when she asks her questions to chat GPT she gets really bad answers. Instead, I recommend to her to use Wolfram Alpha.
I’ve heard that people have had classes where teachers introduce them to chatgpt so I’m slightly optimistic that the adoption of llm in school will happen faster than that of computers/calculators, which are still underutilized.
The calculator don't do the whole thing for you...
Our school required us to get Ti-83's in 1996 when I was in year 9. I was that kid who built a DIY RS232 comms cable to download and distribute games like Blackjack, Poker, Space Invaders and Penguin to other students. It was always rewarding to see a kid I didn't even know playing a game which I knew I had introduced to the school.
Haha, I'm late to this video but this was the comment I was looking for. My friends and I didn't have the money for a real Graphlink cable so I remember the trials and tribulation of building one ourselves. The amount of hardware and software knowledge gained was priceless. I still have my TI-86 and it still runs ZTetris and I still remember Jimmy Mardell as a god of our time. 😆
I couldn't even begin to count the number of people I shared Fruit Ninja or Portal Prelude with on the calculator. Every exam we had once classmates were finished was filled with the KRLRKLLKL of "swiping" across the keys to slice the fruit. Having access to the program editor was a huge reason I got into the embedded software and hardware career path that I'm on today.
I largely taught myself basic programming ideas by writing calculator programs in high school. A few were games, but I really liked making simple programs that, when they were running, appeared like the normal calculator interface but would give you the wrong answer.
Evil 😂
This is easily became one of my top 10 channels I've discovered in half a decade at least. I appreciate everything you do.
Graduated high school in 2010 and Tetris on my 84 is what got me through it! I was a band kid and I even remember writing a program that helped me transpose music pretty quickly. Good times.
I still keep my TI-84+ around for the nostalgic games. heck, I had mine loaded up to jailbreak the PS3!
Texas Instruments was always ahead of the curve on this. It published/packaged “The Great International Math on Keys” book with the TI-30 in the late 1970s. That was the calculator I used in high school physics class.
One of my favorite things in math class was writing programs to automate things we were learning. Knowing TI-Basic made me a magician to my classmates.
In middle school I wrote my own platformer in BASIC for my TI-84, drawing the entire game with text and storing the map data in the matrices.
I was one of the first to have a graphing calculator in my highschool math classes in the 90's and my teacher wouldn't let me use it for tests is exams, fearing that I would cheat with it. I may have barely passed those classes but I aced my computer classes were I was programming games on said calculator! 😂
Thank you for the lovely piece of nostalgia. Not that I thought I would find myself nostalgic about a Ti-34, but here we are.
Amazing content.
34!!!
@@PhilEdwardsInc Ti-84. Sorry to get your hopes up.
Great video! My group of friends in high school all had TI-89s loaded with games, much to our teacher's dismay.
One time, I got a detention for playing Blockdude because I decided it would be a great idea to play it when she was explaining the lesson in front of the class.
I would love to see you do another video focusing on some of the most innovative and impressive games and applications that people have made over the years.
Wow. I had no idea this blew up into such a phenomenon. My first 'gig' was writing games for the TI-83 and selling them to my classmates for $5/pop back in 2003/4. The big seller was a fishing game where you catch fish (or boots, old tires) sell them, buy better gear, and eventually catch exotic sharks and octopuses etc. My favorite, though, was coding a clone of that old Gorillas game where two stationary characters throw exploding bananas at each other (precursor to Worms Armageddon). Calculus finally 'clicked' for me when I realized it could be used to plot the trajectories of the bananas.
hahah this is the most inspirational banana-related calculus story i've ever read.
I loved the original Gorillas game, we had it on the PC we had as our only one in the house from 1990-1997, and I remember being excited when I realized that Microsoft's QBasic was similar to TI Basic, but I wasn't really successful in my attempts to edit the game.
I also remember having some sort of Mario knockoff game called Penguins or similar....it was quite a bit like a Mario game, except for the part where you couldn't jump on enemies to kill them - if you attempted that, you'd just die
As many others have chimed in, I also got my start on programming with my TI calculator in school, and now I'm a software engineer. The big difference that I've seen among students learning programming for the first time is that if there isn't drive/passion, they don't usually grasp the concepts or do too well. Programming is at it's core just problem solving, and if it's not a problem that you're passionate about, you won't allocate the necessary resources to actually understand the why of the solution if you come up with one.
This is very true. Many people just learn it because they want the money and the "easy" job that it requires.
I'm sure I'm just echoing what hundreds of other people have already said, but the TI-8X series of calculators really did change my life. I would have never been exposed to programming if I hadn't had a portable device that I could use in school unassumingly to make my own programs on. The BASIC language taught me so much about the fundamentals of programming, and because of these calculators, I was able to finish a graduate degree in computer science. And yes, I still carry my TI-84 with me in my backpack to this day
Oh yeah, I'm one of those people who got their first start in programming on the TI-83. Stupid stuff, usually editing other people's basic games. I remember changing a racing game that when you pressed a button, it would take you to a menu that had a whole bunch of cheat notes for every unit in our Algebra II class, including solvers. I felt so clever (because what? a teacher was going to let me play a racing game during class?), but I probably learned more _making_ that app than in the actual practice problems...
Shockingly as a high school math teacher I am shocked that so few students do this. When I was in highschool we all had these games. It is not very common now since most people just play on their phones.
Hey! Really cool video! As a calculator enthusiast myself, I was surprised how well-informed this video was, and the quality is impressive as well. Keep up the good work!
TI85 users far out-numbered me in high school calculus, but when it was game-time, my HP48 was their drug of choice. English class had its regulars and I was often offered lunch delectables to secure a higher place in line. The HP had a better LCD screen and was already rocking assembly. It could even beep. Those were some heady days of nerddom...
TI84 also had assembly. I dont know about the ti85 though.
@@o_sch The 84 came after 85 production had stopped. By then they would have been crazy to not provide legit assembly access in their calcs. 85 did have a hack method, but it wasn't true assembly like the HPs allowed. Keep in mind that HP was targeting science/engineering professionals. Build quality and functionality was/is second to none. Ti was after the high schools. No real need for assembly access in that market back in the 90s. HP fell of the rails as laptops shrunk and grew more powerful. They didn't have an alternate business plan.
As a dealer this excites me greatly
My dad gave me a ti-92 plus for my 8th grade algebra 1 honors class and I absolutely loved it. I then read the entire manual for how to use it and fell in love with the ti calculator space and was the coolest kid because I could teach everyone to cheat with their calculators and play games on them.
Edit: Everyone loved my Ti-92, they called it the fish finder and if you do not know what this calculator looks like I would recommend you search it up.
Do not forget HP!
The HP48 series wasn't common at highschools because it wasn't designed for that and probably too complicated. But it was the de facto standard in college classes related to engineering.
Laptops were out of reach for most students in the 90s, so the HP48 was the first programmable, pocketable device for them. Many of them were incredibly creatine and very skilled (remember, we are talking about computer science students).
Hardware modifications were also common. Yes, overclocking was a thing!
We used the TI-86. One of my HS rivals learned TI-Basic before I did, and started making a variety of basic games with some graphics (which took forever to draw because he was using draw commands). I ended up scooping his code and revamping it, figuring out that we could store "graphs" (images) to save on load times for things that were drawn every time, and otherwise adding more features for the 2.0 release of the game. We never actually discussed this sort of thing, but we ended up leapfrogging each other as we added new innovations and redistributed our versions of the game. Now I use similar logic to build complex Excel macros to make life easier for my coworkers.
Ah, good ol TI optimization. I had this issue with my 2d minecraft i made. Blocks rendered slow enough that you could watch them draw in. At first I set each pixel one by one. Then moved to doing a "wipe" of lines which was hardly any faster. BG loading (what you referred to as the graphs) was not an option since it rendered the whole screen. Eventually I gave up using TI basic and just starting using the assembly. My calculator was too new to use the asmprgm command or whatever it was, since it was blocked out. I couldnt even install an older version of the os since that was blocked, i missed the model number by a month. Luckily it was still old enough that the command could be loaded in from online. I saved a program just with the asm command in it. Then I had to use the Z80 opcodes table to type in each hex code for the corresponding operation. Pain. Nowadays you can just use C/C++ since toolchains have been made for that.
This must be one of my favorite videos of yours, though it's hard to even pick a top 10 since the quality of your work is so incredibly high. Everybody who was involved, those little snippets of videos from other viewers, made me feel very connected to this community of us who watches your videos. It's small touches like those that set you apart from the rest of the creators on this platform. You are one of a kind, and I'm so happy that you are sharing your work with us for free. It's amazing. Thank you, so, so much!
Happy Easter! I’ve been looking forward to seeing this video, and it was definitely worth the wait!
There were a couple of my anecdotes that didn’t make the cut, so I’ll post them here if anyone wants to read them.
I did make games on my calculator, but more often I made programs to make school assignments easier. One day, my chemistry teacher got wind that I had made a program to instantly solve some multi-step homework problems, and she told the class, asking if I were willing to share it.
I was willing, but I thought it’d be funny to add a secret line of code that changed the program to spit out random numbers. No one (except my friend who suspected I was up to something) was any the wiser until we compared homework the next day. Pure confusion.
I gave everyone the right version of the program in time for the test the next day.
Another time, when I was a senior, I made a calculator program to ask out the girl who sat next to me in AP Physics to homecoming. She selected the “yes” option. Very smooth. Good times.
thanks for being part of it!
Very smooth indeed
@@PhilEdwardsInc Thanks for including me! It was fun to reminisce!
I also wrote programs for Chemistry, Trig, and Calc for my TI-83+. I knew how to do the formulas and didn't feel like going through the multistep processes, so I just wrote a calculator program to do it for me. I recently found my old high school calculator, turned it on, and all those games and formulas are still there 20 years later. What a trip!
And this one time, at TI programming camp ... 😁
0.7734 and 5318008 😃
That was the extent of my calculator shenanigans.
everybody, don't turn your screens upside down or I'll get demonetized.
I don't usually comment on videos but it was awesome seeing a video talking about a personal experience I didn't know others shared! I started programming with TI-BASIC in 7th or 8th grade, and my teacher always knew it was me because no one else knew how. Programming TI games and playing them was something I greatly enjoyed throughout my middle and high school years, and I hope that trend continues to inspire others to start programming with it!
I think it is still going! Like you, I was pretty inspired to see so many people doing this. I don't know if anybody did in my grade at school, but it was really neat to learn how widespread it was.
What a delighftul subject, have been waiting for this breakdown like nothing else
At my school we got Ti-83s in 1998. We were so pleased with them. At the time Drug Cartel, Turbo Blockout and Tertis went right round school. Tetris was really good. Some of us wrote some text based games too. I wrote Lamour, a game where you had to try and impess someone at a bar. That went right round school too and some people's parents even saw it.
lamour!! haha bravo
We had Casio calculators. Those really restriced ones nobody was bothering to make games for. Still proud of myself for making a kinda top down based doom clone with 3 levels and somewhat of an enemy "AI"
dang!!
TI-83+ was the first thing I ever wrote code for. Made some programs to help with math, a simple reminders/tasks program, a program to showcase some basic sliding screen animations, and a program for generating sliding screen animations. Was a lot of fun and helped get grasp the basics of programming enough to jump into web development after HS.
Honestly, TI's contributions to computer education, along with Franklin and Bert are sorely overlooked constantly. I'm so glad you wrote that whole lead-up featuring them.
I remember Drug Wars! Most of the calculator games we had in the mid-90s were simple text-prompt games, but there were a few graphical games like Snake and Tetris. We primarily shared them by linking our calculators directly to each other.
These games inspired me to make my own programs on the TI-83. I wasn’t very good at game design, but I did make some useful utilities for classes that allowed calculators.
For some reason the calculator to calculator direct link never worked. But I did figure out that they had a program on computers that could add files to the calculators and also manage their memory. So I would bundle programs into different "packages" that kids could ask for, connect their calculator to my computer and then drag and drop all the programs in the folder into the calculator's memory.
I absolutely destroyed my classmates at Tetris as you could play heads-up using a link cable. Then the Internet rolled around and I learned I wasn't shit at it, haha.
Wow! This was a video I didn’t know I needed. You’re really killing it with topics to explore man. Really glad we get to go on these journeys with you!
My dad's was a TI-59 - I think - with the magnetic program strip. I used to play a moon lander game on it. There were no pictures, only digits.
59! This is a nice aesthetic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-59_/_TI-58
In the late 90s I had a graphing calculator that my friends and I used to link up (using the link cable) and have dueling Tetris tournaments in math class. My group were all fantastic at math, and this was an easy course, so we were acing it - thus never wanted to pay attention in class. It got so bad that our teacher told us "unless you are taking notes on them, I don't want to see your calculators out." We stowed them, having been admonished, but the next day I decided to take notes just to mess with her. She gave us the same warning, to which I smartly stowed the calculator. After class I approached her and showed her my screen. I was, in fact, taking notes on my calculator. She just pointed to the door and simply said, "get out."
I remember my first year of college 1994, TI-85 came out with a data link cable that let one type on a computer and then save those notes to a program in the calculator. It was a game changer that let one easily store notes in the calculator. Other students were typing in notes using the calculator's number buttons which was super slow and tedious requiring multiple presses of the same button.
Drug dealer Phil would be like "hey, I'll sell you some Tylenol, but don't take more than a gram a day, that's bad on your liver, also if the pain doesn't stop in a few days, see a doctor, here's a list of nearby ones, and a nearby emergency clinic is right around the corner"
"Oh the hard stuff (squints eyes) I've got some ibuprofen if you really need it, maybe naproxen, but first are you a cop? cus you gotta tell me if you're a cop"
"Hey you...come over here. OK, make sure to have a full glass of water with that..."
I recall commenting about "can it run DOOM?" on your community post about this. I'm still hopeful that we end up getting a video from you about it! Its a fascinating and massive topic that I think would be right up your alley to research.
it is on my list! as a long time follower of john carmack on twitter i'd like to figure out a way into it.
@@PhilEdwardsInc Carmack is from another dimension where they grow geniuses in a lab, I swear. If you do go looking for DOOM related info, DoomWorld is an astoundingly active forum to this day, and the people and old posts there would likely be able to point you in the right direction. 🤙
@@liamaldrich2476 will add to the note! thanks.
@@PhilEdwardsInc it exist on the Nspire. Also ti89 has a nice one done on the Fat engine. zDoom is a good version for the Ti83
1980, my school got six TRS-80 Model III computers (16K of memory, tape recorder memory). No one wanted them and I said, "Yes" because they looked cool. I set them up in my inner-city 5th grade class, learned BASIC, taught it to the first group of students, then turned the machines over to them to run and maintain. It was amazing what they came up with and gave them control of a new technology. And it started me on my journey to getting a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. Any new technology can be used...or abused.
Casio calculators can run games fine if they’re written in C(++) instead of BASIC
This video randomly showed up in my recommendations and reminded me how I used to program games for casio calculators... it was a great era!
Now working in the ia field, I definitly benefited from these hours spent programming on small lcd screens
I remember this very well I still have the computer interface cable to load the games in a box somewhere. I think ti-basic was the first programming language I learned but never got into making games. I had one math class I wrote a bunch of programs to do the work and was using them all year. Then one of the other students did the same and asked the teacher if he could use them at the end of the year. She determined you have to really know the math to know how to program it and let us use them on our tests. She made the final intentionally longer than could be finished in the time and graded on a curve. I finished it with the help of my programs.
Im glad that even with 200k subscribers and tons of videos, you still interact with the community, not many others do that.
getting a bit slower though! sometimes it gets a bit blurry with more comments, but it's pretty cool to see some of the anecdotes and i think that, at least at some subconscious level, they help me make better future videos.
digging up my old calculator from middle school and looking at my old games was such a nice nostalgia trip. i made the first part of pokemon up to where you choose your starter, along with many versions of minesweeper. now im looking up videos on ti games to see if anyones had a similar experience and i find myself here. nice video.
So I studied calculus in 1999 here in Australia. We were the first year allowing graphics calculators in our university entrance exams. I was the only student with a link cable, loaded notes and made games. Sold access to the cable for other students to load their own notes.
I got a Ti-84 plus for my 14th birthday specifically because I found it cool that it could play games. Years later I still play and even make games for it.
As an Aussie who has never heard of TI calculators, we clearly missed out on alot of this secret math class gaming 👀
Which rapper makes your calculators?
TI calculators are very popular in Australian high schools and have been for years in Math B and C.
I always enjoy your videos! Great content and presentation. I always find myself thinking “well, I never wondered about that but this is fascinating!”
thanks!
It's really fun to see someone who isn't an enthusiast covering these!
yeah i was in awe of some of the internal calculator histories out there
I am in high school rn, and we still do this. I use a TI-nspire, which allows python code to be installed, which means I can import turtle - and honestly I feel blessed knowing that I did not go through the struggle of coding in assembly. At the same time however, its pretty wild how we see the progression of programming has translated onto graphing calculators.
The python code is not the best for games because of its size and also speed. But TI basic is also too slow. The best way to do it is use the C/C++ toolchain which converts it to Z80 ASM (for the ti84) which i wish i had when I was first writing asm to speed up my games.
Back in 2003, our high school Algebra II teacher loved to find practical projects for students instead of the usual math sheet homework. One assignment was: "make a small calculator program that demonstrates algebra or geometry principles. The program can be anything, get creative." Most students made something in basic and I remember most of the other students really enjoyed it.
I decided to do assembly for some reason (I blame some folks on IRC for the push) instead and made an analog clock. Though, it only kept time while the program was running, unfortunately.
Then later making a simplistic dungeon crawler as a personal project. Which got me into modding, emulation scene, custom mmo servers, small contract software engineering jobs, and eventually professional game development (for the last 12 years)!
this is a good teacher!
As a student I was one of the kids playing games on TI-83 Plus and later TI-92 during math class.. Later after I became a math teacher the devices were still in the classroom (TI-84). My students couldn’t afford them, so we had a classroom set. I tried letting students take them home, but parents would sometimes pawn them off. The TI calculators have so many functions that are rarely used in class. They’re remarkable devices, but I have to admit I think they’re no longer the best tool. Desmos is just as powerful and free! I completed the Circle and now I write math education software. I do think that giving students a chance to explore technology on their own is very important.
Gotta bring up RPN/HP calculators. Had games too and back in the 90s a way easier transfer protocol.
Love the vid.
I remember playing Lunar Lander and some other games on an HP calculator around 1980. (A classmate’s father was a NASA engineer.). So the history of this is getting close to half a century old.
Yes, IR transmission was the bomb, was su funny see everybody aligning their calculators like the "now kiss" meme
Yeah, I got an HP48GX shortly after they came out and couldn't understand why everyone was so interested in the TI calculators which were behind in every conceivable way.
But like a lot of people mentioned, I learned so much programming on mine. RPL and lots of Saturn assembler. Seemed to take everyone else decades to catch up to what my high school calculator could do.
I played a lot of Mr. Worm, Tetris and other games, it was nice to have a timewaster always in your bag at school.
I used to love programming math tools and converters for my TI-83+ Silver Edition! I had a Casio graphic calc before the TI and it was rough to use but I delved into it because it was all I had for a while. Loads of gaming as well, trying to get the link cable to work with the software was really tough though, freezes and hang-ups and corrupted data. Then I got a Palm V and tried to overclock it so I could run a gameboy emulator.
Long story short I ended up getting a TI calculator emulator, and then eventually saw Wolfram Alpha and was like ohhhh, game over man. I don't need this hardware ever again. Shout out to Texas Instruments for keeping their ancient obsolete calculator tech absurdly expensive throughout the years!!! Great video Phil!
Bruh. I would sit all day in math class programming games, or programming a tool that auto calculates that period's algebraic equations we were learning about. They would pass around a bin of TI-82's, so I learned how to identify the one I would always use, and sit in a place where I had a good chance to grab it. Most kids in my time (98-2001) if they purchased a TI-calc would buy the TI-83, however my mom let me splurge on a TI-86, which had a solve for x feature, basically a cheat code for that level of math in a time before showing work was mandatory. Before mario we had the game Penguinz with customizable levels. It was a glorious time to be a young programmer-hacker.
TI-82 user and programmer here! Wrote half a dozen simple game programs that were very popular in my school in the late 90s.
I programmed calculator games for my friends and I to play in high school. I would spend most of study hall everyday in 10th grade coding it. I eventually had a pretty large RPG with equipment, towns that could be entered with shops and random battles. Basically a small Dragon Quest game on my TI-86.
Our teachers would make us show them us clearing the memory on our calculators before tests, so my friend and I wrote a program that mimicked the reset process so our games wouldn’t be deleted.
Sadly I lost my games when the memory backup battery and regular batteries died at the same time.
I currently work as a software engineer. Programming my calculator was a huge part of me getting into programming.
I didn't have any games on my calculator. Instead I programmed a bunch of cheat sheets for tests and the SAT. Since I used a Casio, no one knew how to reset the memory when they checked to clear everyone's calculator. There was also an insane section in my calculator that could just straight up solve almost any equation you enter in it.
Thanks Phil! Great video
Learning to make games for my ti83 back in 1998 is what spurred my interest in coding in general. Ultimately it lead to pursuing a compsci degree.
Great video, it was fun to watch!
I got into software engineering due to programming my calculator. It's a shame TI is cracking down on fun programming by disabling assembly programming on the TI-84 Plus CE (although there's a jailbreak to bring it back) and implementing Python in a way that force the programs to pause and wait for key presses. On the bright side, these restrictions got me interested in hacking!
I've been messing around with graphing calculators for 7 years now so if you have any questions about them, I'm more than happy to help!
Knew I would recognize some names here.
-SeeGreatness
Before they were there were gaming apps, smartphones, or just regular flip phones with downloadable games in the early 2000’s; there were the games you could download from a computer to your scientific calculator. These were the first true video game apps ever. Now your smartphone has a scientific calculator feature included in its programming.
Oh man, this brought back memories! I was introduced to all this in 6th grade, I think, by two students in the next grade up, and when I counted the programs on my calculator (TI-84, then TI-84 SE) several years later, I had over 200 of them. Most of them my own, and today I'm in my sixth year of working as a software engineer in the games industry. The TI-83 instruction booklet had a simple program at the back called "the chaos game" which produced a Sierpinski triangle, and I think that was one of the first real programs I ever wrote.
Notable memories include: a high/low guessing game, projectile targeting, MirageOS + Mario (I played that game so much), Paper Plane, Block Dude... I also wrote programs to do math for me (in one case, I wrote the program after it was cleared at the beginning of the exam) and my favorite was one I wrote to compute equilibrium constants for a given chemical reaction, numerically approximating them by using the bisection method (which I "formally" learned years later in college!). I still have that calculator :D
you are the second person to mention the coolness of the sierpinski triangle!
It’s videos like this that make me a fan! Well done.
I had a TI-57 calculator in 1978, a very early programmable calculator that could record and playback keystrokes. I discovered that it had a small rounding error in the inverse cosine function, which enable me to program a tiny random number generator. I used this to make a Yahtzee program, and played the game in science class (calculators were strictly forbidden in math classes).
I am a few years too old to have been able to get into this. I think I had a TI-81 which only had enough memory to program a quadratic equation solver. Mostly I used it for coming up with trigonometric formulae that drew pretty pictures on the graph screen when you plotted them.
We were always threatened with resets for exams but it was either too much trouble or the teachers knew there wasn't enough memory for us to gain much advantage; especially when so many points were awarded for showing your working, not just getting the correct answer.
Good stuff! I think one of the big reasons high schoolers are still programming their calculators despite having access to phones/computers is because of how accessible it is. You don't need an IDE or a compiler or anything, you just tap the PRGM button and start typing. Plus you can do it in the middle of a class, which happens to be when you're the most bored ;)
For me, its also what got me interested in computer science and pushed me to go down that path. 10 years later, still doing calculator stuff but now with a comp sci degree!
that's a good point.
In my math class in high school, we had to do some kind of math based project. I made a TI-85 based choose your own adventure game. If you went into the cave, you'd die from a dragon attack that was animated. Every since, I loved programming.
I wrote an absurd number of programs for my TI-83+ that are still on ticalc. The irony is that once I coded one up, I had learned the material, so I didn't need to use it... but the rest of the school still got to benefit!
Many of us had RPN calculators, dominated by the HP 48. There were tons of commercial apps and expansions sold for engineering industries, and they were also easy to program. Lots of games to go around.
I love that one guy's cotton candy hair. He looks like a wizard
As a student still in college (soon to be out) my TI-84 CE is my baby. She's served me dutifully throughout college, as did my TI-84+ CSE and TI-84+ SE before that. I love it because it was always so powerful and unique as not only a tool for games, but effectively a mini computer. I'd spend hours bored in school with teachers looking out for smartphones playing whatever calculator games I wanted with them none the wiser. I'm currently trying to beat Link's Awakening DX with TIBoy, the CE Game Boy emulator. Thanks for making this and defending our right to calculator games.
Oh boy I remembered those days. I had flappy bird, space invaders, Pac-Man, 2468, hangman, and a ton others.
We didn't have a calculator game sharing community. But I did build my own games on my TI-85. It was some of my first programming experience. Certainly helped me become the nerd (and professional programmer) I am today, over 25 years later 😁
As a current high school student, calculator games are definitely still alive among the computer "geek" circles, I have a few friends who have loaded Pokémon games on theirs! They often share games and show each other new ones. It's a pretty small community, but still very much alive
I learned TI-basic in 2020. Iv made a couple of games for myself, its just fun seeing it all come together. I think TI-basic is also really easy to use
Absolutely bonkers! Had no idea this was a “thing!”Your video actually had me Google your calculator, LOL!😂Love your videos and the education factor they have. Subscribed just today.🙏🏻🎧
TI should re-release an unlocked TI-83 and TI-84 CE but put it in a different shell to make it obvious it's the unlocked version. It could generate some revenue, encourage programming, and make it obvious to test proctors it's unlocked.
It could be a programmer oriented TI calculator designed to promote programming. It could feature a built-in code editor, compiler, and assembler. It could have a sideways or square shaped shell or come in bright neon colors.
But, that would make too much sense and make too much profit. Nah, can't do that.
Ah man was always jelly of the kids with their fancy graphing calculator games. Well at least on my ti 30x iis i could type out 80085. Love how you are building a community with community driven videos my man.
Our chemistry teacher was fine with us storing "notes" on our calculator, but after I did some programming and sharing the entire school now had a program that could give a guaranteed A in one of the hardest classes in that school.
Man, early-mid 90s all we had on our calculators at our school was a very rudimentary minesweeper game...
I was a TI-83+ Silver Edition owner in high school who did some basic programming on my calculator and did make some games which I distributed to friends. However, when I got to Physics, I started writing a basic program for most of the problem types that I encountered in my homework. Since we were allowed to use calculators on tests, I then used those programs by identifying the type of the problem and inputting the numbers. When my teacher became aware, he asked a few questions then told me that as long as I NEVER shared them with others, he was ok with it because, "If you understood it well enough to program it, then you have demonstrated that you learned it". I never shared it with anyone else.
He also told me that if I didn't show my work, I wouldn't get any partial credit for wrong answers, so I made some of the programs output steps along the way which I could write down.
It might seem to some like I was cheating, but ultimately, I didn't ace every test. Sometimes my programs were wrong, sometimes they didn't account for how a problem on the test was different than the one we did in our homework. I learned more than just physics.
My sister bought her ti-84 a many many years ago, and now its been passed to me. I've sent through 8 batteries already when her four batteries lasted her 3 years aha. I've spent a quite a lot of time on it, sending games, coding a few of my own for a school project, as well as connecting a bit with the community :) its great seeing ancient websites of passionate people talking about programing games - on a calculator!
My dad was in school when calculators first started appearing in classes. His elderly teacher told him to not bother learning how to use one as they were just a fad, and would never catch on. To this day he doesn't use calculators and he is an engineer.
Drug Wars was great because it was really easy for kids to edit the location names in the game to make it local. Yes to Phoenix that game was amazing, someone put some serious time into making that one.
Wow... this video makes me feel old. 😊 I graduated high school in 1980. We were the last class to have to learn how to use a slide rule in science class. Had to go to several Radio Shack stores to even find one to buy for the class. And we knew that the following year was going to get to use calculators. There is nothing like learning something that you know is obsolete as you are learning it. I never used a slide rule since.
I may only be 15 years old, but for as long as I can remember I’ve always played the calculator games. There was a game pack called, Puzz Pack and it included games like Block dude, Pecs, and puzzle frenzy. I really like to code and have made a few websites and I’m thinking about coding a calculator game at some point.
I wound up in middle school in the 90s, stuck with a Casio instead of a TI.
The Casio BASIC lacked some features that made the TI uniquely suited for gaming:
There was no "insert at coordinates" command.
I did write a turn based arena combat sim, MUD style, but dreamed of Tetris.