I mostly remember playing games on my TI-84 in high school. We used it in class maybe once or twice. None of my college classes allowed graphing calculators on tests, so ironically I had to buy a "dumb" calculator even though I owned the fancy one.
I mostly remember playing games on my TI-84 in high school. We used it in class maybe once or twice. None of my college classes allowed graphing calculators on tests, so ironically I had to buy a "dumb" calculator even though I owned the fancy one.
There are other features that can be useful - scientific notation, symbolic solver, unit conversions, etc - but graphing as such always seemed like a gimmick.
I think it's more of a not-entirely-rational appeal to parents: "if my kid has a top-notch calculator for high school / college, maybe they're gonna be better at math". And kids did not object, but in the end, mostly just sideloaded games and horsed around.
Well, I wrote a couple of programs that were useful for quite a while. They involved electromagnetism and changing frames of reference. I definitely was able to do quite a lot of Physics with my Ti-89.