Welcome to SuperTutorTV, my name is Brooke, and today I'm going to show you how to put
programs on your calculator.
You are not cheating!
It's not as if the companies that are putting out these tests are going to advertise to
students, "hey, you can use calculator programs to make your life easier!"
I recommend very strongly that you go and you double check the calculator policy before
you actually go in to take the exam because that calculator policy is subject to change
at any time, and you can find that online at the SAT website.
And for the ACT, big disclaimer here!
The ACT people changed their calculator policy actually about a year ago, September 2014,
and you can read all about that on their website as well.
They do allow some calculator programs, but it's very restrictive which ones are allowed,
and which ones are not, so you can read about that in their frequently asked questions and
if you go to the part where they talk about the CAS systems, that's the section, if you
look down at the bottom of that list, that's what you want to check out to make sure that
whatever calculator programs's you're using, that they are permitted.
So, that aside, let's get started.
To get started, what you're going to need: you're going to need a TI-84.
It doesn't have to be the one that I have - I have the TI-84 Plus C, which is the color
edition, which I like, but you don't have to have this calculator.
You can have any ti-84.
Now, if you have a TI-83 or a TI-89 or a TI-92, this tutorial will still work for you, but
you will be downloading different programs, potentially.
If you have a TI-Nspire, you're going to have more trouble finding cool calculator programs,
so I have already forewarned you.
And you're going to need a USB cable, preferably the one that came with your calculator.
I actually don't know where the one that came with my calculator is right now, so I have
this one.
It happens to work.
Some USB cables that did not come with your calculator may not work.
Let's get started!
The first thing that we need after we have these two tools is we need to download the
software from TI, if you have not already.
That software is called TI Connect Software.
So I'm just going to get on Google here - I have a Mac, so I'm going to download TI Connect
Software for Mac.
I'm going to warn you, if you are a Mac user, there are some iterations of Mac operating
systems that do not like TI Connect software.
So I see TI Connect software for Mac and then I have the software version 4.0, and I just
click on it to download it.
I'm going to continue as a guest, you don't have to make a username, don't worry, you
don't need to sign away your life.
It downloads down here to the corner, and then after that's done downloading, I'm just
going to go ahead and find it in the Finder - you need to figure out where your computer
downloads things to - and then you can go ahead and open that up.
So I went to right where this is in my Finder, and here it is, and then I can just double
click on that.
Once it's downloaded it will open a window, and then I'm just going to install the program.
Open it up, it says "welcome to the TI Connect for Mac OSX."
I'm just going to click continue, and I'm going to continue, I'm going to agree.
Install for all users of the computer, yes that's fine, I click on that, I click on that,
I'm going to say install and then I'm going to type my secret password.
Writing files, installing software!
And it's going to take a minute for all this to go down.
It was successful!
And once it's installed, my computer needs to restart.
And then after we've restarted, we're going to look for the program.
So the program again is called TI Connect, and I'm actually going to just drag and drop
it down into my task bar here so that I can access it at any time.
You can see it opens very quickly.
We're going to actually go to the Device Explorer here, we're going to double click on it, and
after we've double clicked on the Device Explorer, it's going to open up, we're going to see
the window.
But there is no device to explore!
Because we have not plugged in our calculator.
So very important, I'm going to clear my window here, so that's nice and clear, there's nothing
on it.
Then it's very important your calculator has to be on.
If for some reason your calculator is not on or the screen isn't lit up, this will not
work.
If it doesn't come up right away, you can always click the refresh button right here,
if it doesn't come up.
As you can see I've already put some programs on my calculator, it's the AFACTOR, ALBOSS,
ALGEBRA, all of these nice little things here.
Now, let's say you don't have any programs and your friends don't have any programs,
then you need to find some programs or write some programs.
I recommend finding programs to start because it's a lot easier than writing them, but I
definitely encourage you get into writing programs if you're into that.
Go to this website called ticalc.org.
This is a nonprofit site, this is a basically self-policed site.
People create whatever programs they want to create, they upload them here for free,
so everything you do on this site is at your own risk.
You are downloading files that random people have uploaded to the internet, they may or
may not work well.
As you download these, I really recommend that you do one at a time.
If something causes problems on your calculator, just delete it, get it off of there.
Go back into the device explorer and click delete.
The other thing is that there's a lot of redundancy between the programs, so a lot of the programs
will do the same thing, but they'll do it in slightly different ways and so it might
take you a little bit of time to figure out which one works best for you.
I'm going to go to archives.
Archives is code for "this is where all the files are."
Then we go to file archives, then in file archives you can see I'm going to go down
in this section.
Now I'm going to be honest with you, I have a TI-84 Plus Color edition, and this says
"84PlusCE" - those are the ones that are specifically for the color edition, but any programs in
the 83 and the 84 Plus will work on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, but they might have
display issues.
So it says "the files in this directory are not intended to work on the TI-84 Plus C Silver
Edition."
A lot of them do still work, but they might not display properly and that might give you
some issues.
That's the same with the TI-84 Plus files - they're not intended to work with them,
but they still will work.
So I actually have downloaded some from there and again that's why this is all at your own
risk.
I generally like basic and asm programs because they tend to take up less space.
I'm going to go into the basic right now for the 83 and 84 Plus math programs.
As you can see there's all these different places I can go.
I'm going to go to geometry.
There's a program that I really liked called Poly that can find all pertinent information
for any polygon, real or imaginary, meaning an n-gon with internal angles, whatever, with
just one snippet of information that you know.
If you know the internal angle or the external angle, diagonal, side, angle sum, it will
output the other information.
It's kind of a fun program.
So as you can see there's lots of cool tools for conics, distance - this finds the distance
between two points and slope, that sounds sort of interesting or useful.
So, you basically just click on something to download it.
Then what happens is you go to "show in Finder," I'm just going to show where it is in Finder,
I can double click on that, it's going to open up, and then it turns into one of these
little files.
And then this is super easy, the way that we put it onto our calculator, is that we
just come over here to our device explorer, I'm going to press refresh because I think
my calculator actually turned off because it was taking a nap.
So I'm going to click refresh, and if that little alert comes up, just click refresh
again.
If it's still giving you trouble, just unplug your calculator and plug it back in.
As you can see, don't freak out if it doesn't work right away - it really could just take
a second.
Plug it in, unplug it, turn it off, turn it on, all that good stuff.
So what you do is you just take it and you drop it on the calculator, and then after
you've dropped it on the calculator, it then will show up over on your calculator.
So as soon as you see the little spinny thing stop, you can go ahead and unplug your device,
it's going to disappear from your device explorer.
Then you can go to programs, it's PRGM, you just click on that button and then the programs
will come up that you've put on your calculator.
You press program, I obviously have some other programs already on my calculator.
So I'm just going to click in right now to this one that's called AFactor, I just press
enter after I get to the menu when it's selected, it's the first one so it's automatically selected.
It says PRGM=AFACTOR?
You just press enter to run the program.
X=?
That's a prompt that wants you to give them a number that you're going to put in the prime
factorization of.
I'm going to say 124, just for kicks.
Then I press enter and it tells me the prime factors are 2, 2, and 31.
There's three of them.
Then it gives me the divisors as you can see, and then it's going to give me all of the
factor pairs which is great.
So the problem that can arise when you're working with stuff on the color, when it's
from a program that isn't a Color program specifically, is that it might not display
properly.
So I can maybe try to show you that here.
Let's go 1, 1, and then we'll do 4, 2.
As you can see, you see how this goes like that and it just keeps going?
The slope is actually point 3 repeating and the y intercept is point 6 repeating, but
you see how it cuts off right there - how it does .33x?
So the display isn't quite right in that section as you can see.
The other thing that can happen is that if I have a repeating decimal in the slope and
an intercept is even, it can actually reprint the dot 33's underneath here and it makes
it look really weird and awkward.
So I always just trust the slope and the y intercept here on this particular program.
There are three keys that are your best friends.
Those three keys are the 2nd quit, clear, and enter.
So here are some of the calculator programs that I've downloaded, these are what they're
called: one of them is called A-FACTOR, that's a prime factorization program, another one
is called Algebra 2, that's that algebra 2 solver that I was showing you earlier.
All Triangles - this is a really cool program that shows you all triangle angles and things
like that.
We've got a Pythagorean Theorem - I don't really need the Pythagorean Theorem but, hey,
maybe you like the Pythagorean Theorem on your calculator.
Heron's Formula, which finds the area of a triangle given the side lengths, even if it's
not a right triangle.
Poly, which is a polygon program, which is really helpful on the SAT when they give you
things like "find the interior angle of an irregular octagon."
Quad, which I think is also a quadratic equation.
So those are some basics, but the exciting thing is that you can look through all this
stuff on ticalc.org and you can download whatever you think is useful, or whatever you think
you might want to use.
Hopefully you can find some calculator programs that are going to help you be more effective
students on the SAT or even beyond!
I hope this was helpful!
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Goodbye!