Posted on by Jenny

Back 2 School Bash: Win a Texas Instruments TI-Nspire Calculator!

This next giveaway is perfect for all of you who have kids in advanced math classes in high school or college – the Texas Instruments TI-Nspire Graphing Calculator – with touchpad!!

Now I’ll be honest.  I uh…haven’t taken any math classes since my freshman year of college (meeting the minimum requirements, baby!) a looooooong time ago, so I had my brother, a total genius and high school math teacher, and my nephew, a total genius and 13-year-0ld Algebra 2 student, try this out for me.  And they LOVED it!  According to my brother, “The TI-nspire is quite simply a cross between TI’s traditional graphing calculator and a very tiny laptop (with no internet access).”

Here are some of their favorite features:

  • Students can save their work and transfer it to their computer to work on or print. (The computer program works exactly like the calculator!)
  • The Nspire records keystrokes and displays them as they would appear in a math book. There is no more wondering “if I typed this right.”
  • The screen can be split to show many aspects of the same problem – a graph, an equation, and a table, for instance – all on the same screen.
  • It is useful for many, many math courses ranging from Algebra to Calculus, Statistics, and Linear Algebra.  A student can realistically use it for all of high school and college (and maybe junior high and grad school).
  • You can draw geometric figures on it.  It eliminates the slight, unavoidable errors that creep into geometric constructions produced on paper.
  • If you really would rather have a more traditional graphing calculator, you can get a TI-84 keypad that slips onto the Nspire.

My brother also had some tips on “What you need to know before you buy this calculator”:

  • It retails for about $130; you should consider it an investment.  It helps to divide the price by the number of years of use.
  • It takes a while to learn how to use.  After using TI’s other graphing calculators for twenty years, it took me awhile to find some of the keys I wanted.  Your student will need to consult the guide that comes with the calculator to use some of the more complex features.  My soon-to-be-eleven-year-old figured out how to do the basic stuff in about twenty seconds.
  • You will need to break your student of an annoying habit that is sometimes encouraged by their teachers.  Hitting clear after every calculation is a very, very, very bad idea on any calculator; on the Nspire it is a tragedy.  Hitting clear hides the student’s thinking.  That’s the beauty of this calculator; if the student will cooperate, the file management system preserves the thinking.

Thanks to my brother Charles and my nephew Charles Robert for giving the TI-Nspire a whirl!  Now here’s how you can win one of these amazing machines:

1) Leave a comment on this blog post

2)  For an extra entry tweet about this contest on twitter with a link back to this post, then leave a separate comment with your tweet URL. You may copy this if you wish “Win an awesome Texas Instruments TI-Nspire calculator from @momminitup & @jennyitup #wingiveaways enter here http://bit.ly/duh1ke”

3) Post on Facebook about Mommin’ It Up – like our page if you haven’t already and then leave a separate comment on this post letting us know you did so.

4) Subscribe to our blog feed and leave us a comment letting us know you did or already do.

This and all giveaways end Monday, August 16th at 3pm EST.

This giveaway was sponsored by Texas Instruments as part of Win Giveaways Back to School Bash. This Post was written by me and was not edited by the sponsor. Read more on our disclosure policy. Find more information on the terms for this giveaway on the Win Giveaways Facebook page.

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