About this Book
Graphing calculators are a useful tool for students, teachers, SAT test-takers, professionals, and just about anyone who needs to work with numbers and graphs. You can use a graphing calculator to help solve math and science problems or to check your work, to draw graphs and manipulate statistics, and even to write programs. But all this power can make your graphing calculator an intimidating device. With all the features your calculator offers, you might have difficulty figuring out where to start. And that’s where this book comes in. It focuses primarily on the TI-84 Plus CE, TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, but also can help you with any TI-83 Plus or TI-84 Plus calculator. In the coming chapters, you’ll see almost everything your calculator can do, from the simplest arithmetic to complex graphing, statistics, calculus, and programming.
This second edition introduces brand new material covering TI’s color-screen TI-84 Plus CE and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators. It covers the unique features of the new models, as well as the math and science skills that remain the same as on the older monochrome calculators. These new models bring vibrant color, rechargeable batteries, and, in the case of the TI-84 Plus CE, a thinner, lighter case, and almost every example and lesson throughout this book applies to the new models.
Before you begin chapter 1, I’d like to give you some background material about this book and how you can use it. First, I’ll show you a roadmap for the book, in which I’ll introduce the material in each of the four parts, 13 chapters, and three appendices. Of course, you can also use the index or table of contents to find specific material. Next, I’ll discuss who should use this book and how you can use it, whether you’re a student, a teacher, a professional, or simply learning to use graphing calculators. I’ll present the typographic conventions used throughout the book, point you to online resources that might help if you get stuck, and conclude with a few words about myself.
Let’s get started with a roadmap of the material in this book.
This book consists of 13 chapters, divided into four parts, plus three appendices for quick reference. Part 1 focuses on introductory TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus skills for arithmetic, algebra, and graphing.
- Chapter 1 introduces graphing calculators, starting with five sample problems picked from a cross-section of what your calculator can do. It explains what you’ll need to use this book, and it highlights the similarities and differences between the color TI-84 Plus CE and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and the monochrome TI-84 Plus and TI-83 Plus–family calculators.
- Chapter 2 presents the basics of math and algebra on the graphing calculators, from arithmetic, square roots, fractions, and exponents to solving algebraic equations and using logic.
- Chapter 3 covers the basics of graphing functions in the form y=f(x) on your calculator, complete with plenty of real-world examples. You’ll also learn to draw graphs, find maximum and minimum points on graphed functions, and determine exactly where functions cross other functions or the x axis.
- Chapter 4 teaches variables, lists, and matrices, three different ways to store numbers. Variables store single values, lists store one-dimensional sets of numbers, and matrices store two-dimensional arrays of numbers. Through many examples, you’ll discover how to manipulate variables, lists, and matrices, as well as how to do math with them.
Part 2 teaches precalculus and calculus skills. You’ll start with more ways to graph, cover all the calculator precalculus skills you didn’t see yet, and then work with your calculator’s calculus toolset.
- Chapter 5 teaches you how to graph in parametric, polar, and sequence modes. You’ll work through many example problems showing where these new graphing modes are vital. The chapter also introduces drawing on the graphscreen and saving and recalling annotated graphs and diagrams.
- Chapter 6 rounds out the precalculus skills you already gleaned from the first five chapters with a few new skills. It shows you how to work with imaginary and complex numbers on your calculator, discusses more about trigonometry, and shows you how to compute limits, logarithms, and exponentials.
- Chapter 7 covers the TI-84 Plus calculus tools. You’ll learn how to find numeric (definite) integrals and derivatives at a point. The chapter also shows the applications of integrals and derivatives on your calculator, including finding the area under a curve, the slope of a function, and the minima, maxima, and inflection points of functions.
Part 3 introduces statistics, probability, and finance.
- Chapter 8 explores your calculator’s statistics tools. It starts with how you can calculate statistics over sets of data and then moves on to plotting one-variable and two-variable statistics as graphs. The chapter concludes with regression, which you use to fit a function or curve to your data.
- Chapter 9 introduces tools and functions for probability. The bulk of the material focuses on probability distribution functions (PDFs) and cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) and how you can calculate and plot them on your graphing calculator. The chapter also demonstrates the calculator’s combinatoric functions and the types of random numbers it can generate.
- Chapter 10 touches on an often overlooked set of functions, the Finance tools. In particular, it shows how you can calculate properties of investments, mortgages, loans, and more with the Time-Value of Money (TVM) Solver. Each concept is made concrete with plenty of examples.
Part 4 goes into advanced concepts and details that don’t fit anywhere else in the book.
- Chapter 11 gives you a thorough introduction to the powerful programming tools built into your calculator. You’ll see sample math programs and games in action, learn about the programming commands in the TI-BASIC language, and find out about additional books and resources you can use to learn more.
- Chapter 12 is a complete reference to the new color-screen TI-84 Plus CE and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators. Although almost all of the examples and skills taught in the book apply directly to this new calculator, it has a few new tools, plus the ability to draw graphs and plots in color. By the end of this chapter, you’ll know how to use all of the new features.
- Chapter 13 concludes with a look at the nonmath things you can do with your calculator, from downloading and running programs and apps to controlling robots and connecting to sensors. It ends with a look forward at the future of graphing calculators.
The appendices provide a quick reference to material, supplementing and coalescing the contents of the chapters:
- Appendix A walks you through how your calculator can help you solve typical SAT math problems quickly and easily.
- Appendix B summarizes important calculator skills. You can find the same material threaded throughout the book, but this appendix crystallizes summaries of each skill for quick and easy reference.
- Appendix C should be your first stop when something goes unexpectedly wrong and you can’t figure out how to fix it. It provides a brief but thorough troubleshooting guide to common and rare calculator issues.
Calculator Crash Course
If you only have time to read two or three chapters, especially if you’re using this book to help you with the SATs, chapters 2 and 3 should be where you start. Chapter 2 teaches you to use your calculator to calculate, and chapter 3 introduces the basics of graphing. For a quick reference to many of the calculator’s skills, flip to appendix B. If you’re focusing on the SATs, appendix A is also a must-read.
If you are learning to use a TI graphing calculator for the first time, you probably are a student. You might be in junior high school or high school, or you might be a college student. Graphing calculators are, of course, also used by teachers, and they remain useful tools for other professionals, especially scientists and engineers. If you are learning to use a TI graphing calculator for the first time, then no matter who you are or how much math and science you know, this book will be a friendly guide allows you to work at your own pace and introduces every new skill with plenty of examples. If you have some experience with graphing calculators, or you’re just in a hurry, this book is an effective quick reference for finding and learning a specific skill fast.
For students, this book will help you use your graphing calculator as a tool for math, science, and more. Whether you’re dealing with algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, statistics, probability, finance, or programming, your graphing calculator can help. The coming chapters will teach you how to use your calculator efficiently, to avoid common pitfalls, and to acquire new skills by way of examples. Although it teaches calculator use, not math or science, this book is the perfect companion for a math or science curriculum. If you’re studying for the SATs, you’ll probably use a TI-84 Plus–family graphing calculator, and this book will show you how to quickly and accurately use the calculator.
This book can also help you if you’re a teacher, no matter how much or how little graphing calculator experience you have. Even if you’re a pro, you’re likely to find new features and gotchas that you never knew about. This book features lessons on the MathPrint tools as well as the quirks of the color-screen TI-84 Plus CE and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, so if you or your students have any calculator in the TI-84 Plus family, this book is a particularly apt companion.
There are two ways to use this book, and you’ll probably end up blending the two. The first way is as a comprehensive guide to graphing calculators, where you read whole chapters, one at a time. Alternatively, you might be in a lesson or working on a homework assignment where you need to know one specific skill fast.
In an ideal world, you’d have the leisure time to read this book cover to cover. You’d be able to sit down with your calculator and read chapter by chapter, trying each example as you learn each new skill. But I’ve been a student recently enough to know that’s not realistic. Some students and teachers might have time to read from cover to cover, but others will only have time to focus on single chapters relevant to what they’re currently covering in class. Still others might need to jump directly to learning a new skill; for example, graphing polar graphs, to complete a math assignment. Perhaps you can only read a few pages and go through an example or two, or perhaps it’s so late in the evening that you only have time to read one paragraph that summarizes what you need to do for tomorrow.
In any of these cases, this book has you covered. The chapters are laid out linearly, progressing from the most basic of calculator skills, doing calculations, up through calculus, probability, and finance. If you read it from cover to cover, you’ll learn more and more advanced skills as you go. The parts and chapters are also written to be as clear as possible even without reading surrounding material, and major skills are summarized in sidebars. If you jump directly to the polar graphing material in section 5.2, for instance, you’ll see a sidebar that succinctly describes changing modes, entering your polar equation, and viewing the graph. If you read more of the prose, you’ll find an example, and if you read through the rest of the chapter, you’ll understand how polar graphing fits in among the other precalculus features your calculator offers.
Because this book is aimed at the absolute beginner, significant effort was put into making the distinction between prose, math, and text typed on the calculator as clear as possible. Examples are woven liberally throughout the calculator skills taught, most of which are firmly grounded in math or science concepts. All of these conventions are followed:
- Math is written in normal font, with variables like x, c, and θ italicized.
- All calculator keys are represented by images like
, 
, 
, and 
. When a string of keys is shown, such as 
, you release each key before pressing the next one. The TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus–family calculators don’t support holding more than one key together. - Any text that appears on the calculator’s screen is written in monospaced font, like 1+1 or sin(3.5X) or fnInt(X2,X,0,4). In early chapters, the keys that type out the given sequence will be shown; in later chapters, readers are expected to know how to type out math on the calculators.
- Most lessons herein apply to the following calculators:
- TI-83 Plus
- TI-83 Plus Silver Edition
- TI-84 Plus
- TI-84 Plus Silver Edition
- TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition
- TI-84 Plus CE
- A few of the lessons cover skills specific to the older black-and-white-screen TI-84 Plus and TI-83 Plus calculators. Such lessons are labeled with the “B&W” icon shown next to this paragraph. Many of the concepts and almost all of the examples also apply to the TI-82, the TI-82 Stats.fr, and the TI-83. The TI-89 and TI-Nspire families are sufficiently different from the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus calculators and this book doesn’t apply to them.
- The term TI-83 Plus family refers to any TI-83 Plus or TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. TI-84 Plus family means any TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, or TI-84 Plus CE.
- Newer versions of the TI-84 Plus–family calculators include a math display system called MathPrint. MathPrint makes the math on your calculator look more like the equations you’d see in a math textbook. Unfortunately, it also means that some skills require different keystrokes on calculators with MathPrint enabled. Chapter 1 will teach you how to tell if your calculator supports MathPrint and how to turn it on and off. Throughout the rest of the book, you’ll see the “MP” symbol next to this paragraph whenever a MathPrint-specific detail is mentioned.
All screenshots in this book were taken with the jsTIfied emulator (http://www.cemetech.net/projects/jstified) and adjusted and annotated in GIMP. All source code listings were generated from the original programs by SourceCoder and checked in jsTIfied.
Chapter 11 teaches TI-BASIC programming; all three sample programs from the chapter can be found on the book’s Manning web page, http://manning.com/mitchell3. If you wish to pursue programming further, there are more example programs in Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus and on that book’s web page, http://manning.com/mitchell. Each program can be tested on your calculator or emulator; a list of the top TI calculator emulators is included in chapter 13. You can also view the source of programs on your computer using SourceCoder, at http://sc.cemetech.net.
The purchase of Using the TI-84 Plus, Second Edition includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about this book, ask technical questions, and receive help from both the author and from other readers. The forum can be reached via www.manning.com/UsingtheTI-84PlusSecondEdition or www.manning.com/mitchell3. This page contains sample content from this book as well as information about the help that the book’s forum provides.
Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It’s not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions lest his interest stray!
The Author Online Forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print. You can also ask technical questions on the author’s forum, Cemetech, which has a special subforum for this book at www.cemetech.net/forum/f/73 (or http://cemete.ch/f73). Chapter 13 lists other resources, including emulators and discussion forums.
Christopher Mitchell PhD is a research scientist studying distributed systems, a teacher, and a recognized leader in the TI and Casio graphing calculator communities. Christopher has pursued his passions for programming, math, and teaching since an early age. He picked up his first calculator at the age of 11 and soon was teaching others to use and program the devices on his website, cemetech.net. Today, he is the graphing calculator community’s most prolific programmer, with well over 300 completed programs. He teaches programming at an undergraduate level and as one of hundreds of experts on Cemetech. Christopher is proud to be a born-and-raised New Yorker. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Cooper Union and a doctorate in computer science from the Courant Institute of NYU.