Okay, before we begin, there are a couple of things that I must clarify. First off, the TI graphing calculator is a very powerful machine all on its own. It is much more powerful than a standard scientific calculator. However, the greatest thing about these graphing calculators is not their ability to graph, but rather their ability to be programmed. If properly programmed, the TI graphing calculator can do just about any math problem for you. Imagine your own conversion formulas or all your line equations able to be done with the push of a couple of buttons. Well, it's possible to be done in TI-BASIC. Furthermore, many math and chemistry classes allow the usage of these machines, and they are also allowed on standardized tests (excluding the TI-92 because it has a QWERTY keypad). Technically this is not cheating either, because you are using the caculator's own resources, and in order to write the program, you must show a proficiency in understanding the formulas, lest your program will never work. However, once programmed, a lot of time can be saved by executing the program to evaluate a formula. I warn you though, that if you do not know how to do the work out, these programs will be useless in math classes, where the professor often wants to see the work ot the problem.

Secondly, these TI-BASIC tutorials were all written using a TI-82, as that is all that I currently own. TI-BASIC is very universal throughout all of the TI graphing calculators. What ends up being different is the buttons and their location. This tutorials should work fine on all TI graphing calculators, save for some command changes, but they are close enough whereas you could figure out the commands on your calculator. However, if demand calls for it, and I can get my hands on another TI graphing calculator, I will have no problem writing new tutorials.

Now let's begin . . . For these tutorials, I will assume that you know nothing about programming whatsoever. However, if you at least have a background in BASIC, these commands should come fairly easy to you. First, turn the calculator on. Next, select the button that says PRGM. Here you will see three commands: EXEC,EDIT, & NEW. Select NEW by hitting the left arrow key once or the right arrow key twice. Now select Create New. For the name of the program, type HELLO and press ENTER.

This now brings us to our programming environment. You will notice a colon (:). This colon represents a new line of code. Each command you type will gets its own, colon. If you press the PRGM button now, you will notice a whole bunch of commands. I will not explain all of them right now, as that is just not possible. You could check your TI manual if your really that eager to know what each command does, but otherwise, you will learn them as you encounter them.

Move the cursor over to the I/O field, and scroll down until you see the ClrHome command. You could select this command in one of two ways, by pressing the number next to it, or by highlighting and then pressing ENTER; this goes for all other commands as well. Once you select it, you will see that it has been placed in your source code. If you press ENTER you will see that you are on a new line with a new colon, which can be used to place code on. In any program that you write, I highly recommend placing the ClrHome command at the beginning. What it simply does is clear the screen of your calculator as the program executes. This means that whatever text you had left on your screen before you ran the program will not interfere with the display of the program itself.

Now we're going to add some functionality to the program. On that new line with the new colon, we're going to place another command. Once again, press PRGM, then go to I/O, but this time select the command Disp. You will see that when the Disp command is in the source code, it leaves a space and then apparently is waiting for more typing to be done. This is true, because as its name implies, this command is used to display information to the screen, but we need to pass that information as a parameter to the command. A parameter is simply some additional information that the command needs to function properly. So now we are going to type "HELLO WORLD.". It is important to include the quotation marks ("), because they are used to denote that text is going to be displayed and not numbers.

Well, that's it for the first tutorial. It may not seem like much, and it really isn't, but in this tutorial, we discussed how to start a new program, how to clear all the garbage off the screen, and how to display text to the screen. In reality, that is quite a bit of functionality. To see the culmination of your work, press 2nd -> QUIT to get out of the programming environment and back to the regular screen. Now press PRGM and under the EXEC field, select your program: HELLO and press enter. Back on the calculator screen, it should read prgmHELL0O. Press enter here to execute the program and see what you have created. Well, that's all until the next tutorial.

The source files for this lesson can be downloaded here.