TI-GENESIS

A collection of the TI-BASIC programs that launched a struggling algebra student into Software Engineering.

History

My first lines of code were written on a TI-83 Plus calculator for my 8th grade algebra course. I had been struggling to master the quadratic formula, but my teacher, a retired Marine, challenged me to program the calculator to solve the quadratic formula, promising it could be used on all future tests. Just two weeks and ten lines of code later I could triumphantly enter the coefficients a, b, and c of a quadratic equation into my calculator to easily get the solutions!

Interestingly, writing that program also gave me the confidence and the skills to help other struggling students to better understand the quadratic formula for themselves. Indeed, through building that first program, I had felt the power of an influential teacher and whetted an appetite for leveraging technology to be such an influence myself.

Contents

I wrote many programs on my calculator throughout High School. Though some of those programs have been lost due to RAM resets as a result of exam requirements or dead batteries, many survived. This repository exists to preserve this important piece of the historical record of my journey into Software Engineering.

Contributing

For me, this particular repository is historical and sentimental, so I probably won't be accepting any PRs into it. That said, I do want to document the tools you can use to more easily develop programs for the TI series of calculators.

TokenIDE: A great IDE to use for programming the TI series of calculators.

• Download: https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/515/x515
• Source Code: https://bitbucket.org/merthsoft/tokenide/src/master/

WabbitEmu: A great emulator for TI calculators.

• Download: http://wabbitemu.org/
• Source Code: https://github.com/sputt/wabbitemu

TI Connect: The official software program from Texas Instruments for copying programs from your computer to your calculator and vice versa.

• Download: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-connect-sw
• Source Code: N/A (proprietary)