Part 1. Getting started with programming

Graphing calculator programming is a great way to dive into the world of programming, to learn more about your calculator, and to enhance your academic prowess and problem-solving skills.

The five chapters in part 1 immerse you in everything you need to know to start writing full, powerful programs. It begins with your first three graphing calculator programs, shows you how to input and output numbers and text, and teaches you conditional and structural commands. By the end of this part, you’ll be able to write programs and games that can interact with the user, make decisions, display menus, perform calculations, and call other programs. In each chapter, you’ll see examples large and small that you can test and play with to cement your understanding of each new concept, and you’ll occasionally be challenged to write your own application.

Chapter 1 introduces your calculator as a math and programming tool. You’ll see how closely it resembles a full computer, and you’ll explore a Hello World program, a quadratic equation solver, and a guessing game. Chapter 2 shows you a systematic approach to writing, editing, and running programs on your calculator, then teaches you commands to interact with the user. Chapters 3 and 4 show increasingly complex program-flow tools, from performing comparisons and using the results to make decisions, to jumping from place to place inside a program, to creating loops and calling subprograms.