TI-nspire from Texas Instruments
Another new and exciting calculator! This is incredibly clever and can do so much more than our standard “little” GCSE scientific ones.
I’d almost go as far as “too clever by half” but it is hard to find something this calculator won’t do.
Obviously it works like a very good basic calculator - happy to work with 4 digit fractions displaying them beautifully. The screen can hold about 7 rows of regular sums - but comes into its own with more complex maths. I was easily able to sum the first 10 square numbers - and the screen gave a very clear sigma with limits.
The whole system functions like an office suite of software - so through a menu one navigates between calculator, graphing mode, lists and spreadsheets and notes (like a word processor).
Think of your work as a document with many pages - a calculations page, a notes page and so forth - then the menus start to make some sense.
The keyboard is quite well designed considering it is trying to fit an A-Z keyboard as well as calculator buttons.
This is not to mention the computer software - to replicate the calculator and to allow interconnectivity.
Many years ago when I purchased my first graphical calculator it was a huge leap forward in handheld technology. The TI-nspire seems like the next generation of handheld calculator products and one that we should expect to see in more and more classrooms in the years ahead.
Peter Hall • Mathematics Teacher, Imberhorne School, East Grinstead
TI-nspire from Texas Instruments
Price: about £70
<< TI-nspire website
