Chapter 1. Diving into calculator programming
This chapter covers
- Why you should program graphing calculators
- How calculator programming skills apply to computer coding
- Three sample programs so you can dive right in
In the past 40 years, programming has gone from being a highly specialized niche career to being a popular hobby and job. Today’s programmers write applications and games for fun and profit, creating everything from the programs that run on your phone to the frameworks that underpin the entire internet. When you think of programming, however, you probably don’t envision a graphing calculator. So why should you read this book, and why should you learn to program a graphing calculator?
Simply put, graphing calculators are a rewarding and easy way to immerse yourself in the world of programming. Graphing calculators like the ones in figure 1.1 can be found in almost every high school and college student’s backpack, and though few of them know it, they’re carrying around a full-fledged computer. Directly on your calculator, with nothing else required, you can write games, math programs that will help you check your work, and science programs to solve hard problems. You’ll learn to think like a programmer, to apply problem-solving skills to surmount obstacles, and to optimize and streamline your software. But you might be asking yourself why you should bother learning calculator programming instead of starting with a computer language like Java or Python or C.