An early TI-81 in use (YouTube/ David Hays) Educators were rightfully wary of change - especially change that wasn’t yet proven to improve student performance. TI, a semiconductor giant, sensed “an opportunity to provide some inexpensive technology that students could use every day.” But there was a problem: At the time, most students were perfectly fine with drawing graphs on paper and using simpler handheld calculators. Though Casio (1985) and Sharp (1986) were the first to market, it wasn’t until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81, that graphing calculators really began to hit the mainstream. In the late 1980s, electronics companies began to see a space in the education market for a calculator that could graph equations. But it appears that the rise of new, free-to-use technology is starting to chip away at this empire. Yet, for millions of middle school and high school students around America, the graphing calculator is still a required standard - and TI controls an estimated 80% of the $300m+ market.Īn obsolete piece of technology has managed to maintain a stranglehold on an increasingly tech-savvy education market. While the cost of its components has dramatically decreased, its price ($150 MSRP) has not. With 24 kilobytes of RAM, a 96×64 pixel screen, and a power system that still relies on 4 AAA batteries, it has been usurped by hundreds of modern handheld devices. Since its debut in 2004, its specs and components have remained virtually unchanged. Interactive equation solver editor for solving for different variables in an equation.Texas Instrument’s best-selling graphing calculator, the TI-84, is a woefully outdated piece of technology.Business functions including Time-Value-of-Money (TVM), cash flows, and amortization full screen interactive editor for solving TVM problems.Fifteen probability distribution functions including Normal, Student-t, Chi-square, Binomial and Poisson.Advanced statistics features including 10 hypothesis testing functions, seven confidence interval functions and one-way analysis of variance.Three statistical plot definitions for scatter plots, xy-line plots, histograms, regular and modified box-and-whisker plots, and normal probability plots.List-based one- and two-variable statistical analysis, including logistic, sinusoidal, median-median, linear, logarithmic, exponential, power, quadratic polynomial, cubic polynomial, and quadratic polynomial regression models.Matrix operations including inverse, determinant, transpose, augment, reduced row echelon form and elementary row operations convert matrices to lists and vice-versa.Horizontal and vertical split-screen options. Seven different graph styles for differentiating the look of each graph drawn.Interactive analysis of function values, roots, maximums, minimums, integrals and derivatives.Function evaluation table shows numeric evaluation of functions in table format.User-defined list names lists store up to 999 elements.Sequence graphing mode shows time series plot, cobweb/stair-step plot and phase plots.Up to 10 graphing functions defined, saved, graphed and analyzed at one time.Graphs 10 rectangular functions, six parametric expressions, six polar expressions and three recursively-defined sequences.Real and complex numbers calculated to 14-digit accuracy and displayed with 10 digits plus a two-digit exponent.Advanced functions accessed through pull-down display menus.
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