Thursday, July 19, 2012

Calculus and TI-nspire

To add to the craziness of my next year (4 preps, first time flipping, possible teacher mentor, math club sponsor, InvenTeam cosponsor, NHS cosponsor, drinker....), I think I want to use "my" class set of TI-nspire calculators for my one calculus class as opposed to the TI-83/84's that I'm comfortable with.

I just got out of a Web Meeting of Calculus TI-nspire users, and there were some cool links and information (I didn't know slope fields were so easy on the nspire).

What I really want is a basic primer document of:
If you do this for calculus on the TI-83, do THIS on the TI-nspire. I know there are documents of walking you through stuff (I saw a 12 page document on Sean Bird's site), which are great for their purpose. But I want a more, two column, easy to sift through, "there there, it's totally possible and you don't have to read through a ton of stuff to find the specific function you want" document. You know, for the many times when I'll be a last minute user of remembering that I need to know how to do "this" right before I teach the class. I don't even mind if the 2 column document has some links to specific instructions on other documents. Does anyone know of such a document? Unfortunately, I don't remember all the stuff I have to do for calculus, but I guess i will this year. Maybe I'll create such a file.

I did learn one cool feature of the TI-nspire for calculus that's totally easy: slope fields! With the 83/84, you had to download a program. With the nspire (not even the CAS, it's just there): under graph > menu > graph type > DiffEqn ... and then just type in your eqn .... remembering to use y1 or y2, etc instead of "y" if you need it. Super cool!

2 comments:

  1. Go to the Nspire Google Group.

    https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/tinspire

    Ask your questions there....I am sure you will get answers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the tip ... I'll go surfing.

    ReplyDelete