Turns out that a negative of the TI-Nspire CAS (and possibly the regular as well) is that the programming is a little more complicated than on the TI-84s. Now, I am not a programming genius by any stretch of the imagination, so if you are here to get lots of tips on how to program the TI-Nspire, all I can offer you is what I learned in writing my first program. Actually, I wasn’t even writing it from scratch. I adapted it from a program I had on my TI-83 SE. My calculus students were doing a lab which required them to calculate an approximate solution to a differential equation using Euler’s method. After initially working through some by hand, I wanted to give them a program that would calculate numerous points quickly.
I had intended to have it ready on the Nspire, but it took me a little bit to get around to it, so I gave them the program on their 83s and 84s, although I was bound and determined to write one for the Nspire. I was successful, and here it is:
Euler program for TI-Nspire CAS
Turns out that on the TI-Nspire you essentially are defining a long ‘function’. There is no opportunity to input data once the program is running. That all needs to be part of ‘calling’ the function. As you can see above I have eulert(x, y, h, n). (x, y) is the initial value, h is the step size, and n is the number of points. Actually, looking at it again, I do not think I need Cycle in there… I’m not really sure what it does anyway!
Additionally, as you can see from the comment, you need to define the differential function (
However, I am happy that was able to get this one to work.
Oh, but did I mention that I kept having trouble saving it in a way that would then allow me to call it up in a new document. And then, even when I had it saved, it took a bit longer to understand the proper syntax. The document with the above program is saved as programs and when I call it in a new document I have to type programs\eulert().
It was a little frustrating overall, but ultimately satisfying to get it to work correctly. I just hope I can figure out the graphing.
17 February 2009 at 3:40 pm |
It is a nice calculator because students can understand better mathematical concepts by just looking the effects of the data analyzed. This calculator is pretty interesting for learning education.
9 May 2009 at 4:48 am |
I also have programmed the TI-83, 84, and the CAS. You can write actual programs in the CAS, in fact, you can write programs that call functions. But no, they have no f**ing input command. ANd you are right in the sense that this reduces your program to nothing more than a function which must be re-run over and over. Very frustrating.
I have been told that the suggested workaround is to make a table first, defining a column as a variable. That would make your variables, I suppose, an array, or possibly a 1xN matrix. You then run your program on the arrays which have already been given values in your table. This might be okay on one column of numbers, but it becomes tedious when inputting values on two or more columns. I still have the TI-84, and still make use of the programming features in it for this exact reason.
But I agree with the above commenter that it is a nice calculator for some math concepts, such as statistics. I like the random generator in it, and have used it to place dice simulations on its spreadsheet, and tabulating the frequencies. But frankly, I would still use the TI-84s for most things, especially transformations of functions and the like.
I have an article on this tomorrow if you are interested (will post around 8PM EST).