Late last night, I found myself out in an alley
selling drugs. And like any seasoned drug dealer, I was doing it all on my calculator.
How did calculator games become so big? From the 1990s to today,
they've been a ubiquitous part of high school life. Games like this, this,
and this, all on a calculator. I got intrigued and I found out that this story is huge.
It has tapped into a giant community. I got hundreds of responses in comments and videos.
In the process, I learned something about the past and future of education.
Seriously, I got 197 comments about this on YouTube. A Patreon, like, chronicle. I had no
idea that this was such a big community. There is a lot of enthusiasm for calculator games
For the uninitiated, let me explain what I'm talking about. Can we
get some calculator lighting in here? “Calculator lighting sequence…initiated.”
That's better. If you've taken
an advanced math class in the past 25 years, you've probably needed a graphing calculator.
I am currently rocking the TI-84 Plus, which is an upgrade from the TI-83 that I had in high school.
This one came out in 2004. It's nice, let’s just say that.
A key part of all the souped-up Texas Instruments calculators is the program button.
It's meant for math stuff, but you can load programs and hence games. So many games.
“One of my friends in high school modded his TI 84 Plus to play Gameboy games.”
“They had one called Phoenix, which was a spaceship game.
It was really great. It had smooth graphics and smooth animation, but it crashed all the time.”
So I'm going to be biased toward Texas Instruments calculators in this video. You will see why in a
few minutes. There were Casios too, for example. But, you know, they could have their issues.
“Hey, Phil, hope you're doing well. Because I wanted to be different,
quote-unquote, through high school and college, I sought out a Casio calculator. There's this
Caspool and it is the most comedically slow program of all time. That trace is the cue ball.”
These games range from super basic ones written in TI BASIC to ones that are written in assembly,
which basically lets you code right down to the metal and do incredible stuff like Fruit Ninja.
I'm serious. Fruit Ninja. How insane is that? “And then there was the Mirage OS, which
let you load super fancy games. Like, you had Mario on there.”
“And I remember folks using the link cable to trade around copies of Mirage
OS and the various games that ran on it.” Lots of weird cultural things arose from having
the ability to put games on your calculator. “Me and my friend organized this scheme to be
like…we must have thought we were like cool drug dealers or something. That we had the goods that
everybody wanted in the school. And then we were going to make a bunch of money selling
calculator games. But the second we loaded some games onto somebody else's calculator, it spread
like wildfire throughout the high school. So we didn't end up making any money. I
think we probably made like $5 and we thought we were going to be rich off the whole scheme.
But either way, we totally ruined math class for years to come.”
“Your question immediately took me back a quarter of a century to my school days. We were on the
TI-83, I think, and being able to play games on this thing that we were required to have for math
classes felt subversive and possibly illegal.” So that's what they are. But I had a lot of
questions, like how did a robust games ecosystem emerge on a device meant for
cosines, sines, and tangents? And I had a few high schoolers
tell me that the phones are bigger, these games are still around today.
“I would say calculator games are still totally relevant in high school, at least with
the kids who know how to load programs onto their calculators from their computer. Personally,
I don't spend a ton of time anymore; I'm more busy actually learning math.”
Why is this calculator relevant today? Why are calculator games still a thing? I think to answer
that, you've got to figure out how calculators got into classrooms in the first place.
Now, we could go way back to the founding of the College Board or the invention of
the handheld Texas Instruments calculator. But I think a good place to start is in the 1980s;
there was a lot of anxiety about putting calculators in the classroom.
But in the late 1980s, there was also an agenda for action. The National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics recommended mathematics programs take full advantage of the power of calculators
and computers at all grade levels, and that teachers should acquire computer literacy.
None of this was obvious at the time. People were really worried about cheating,
and I can tell you that calculator cheating, it happened. I may have committed some of it.
Though there were defenders — poetically, some saw calculators as the liberation of math’s prose
from its grammar. But calculators gained steam, showing up in new curricula like this from 1989.
This was a big change in education. In 1994, calculators showed up on the SAT,
and while I read one paper that chronicled a pretty bumpy ride, basically everybody
followed the College Board's decision to add scientific and then graphing calculators.
As early as 1999, The New York Times wrote that
calculators were starting to throw teachers a new curve.
But that's just the beginning, because there were a lot of approved calculators on that
list. How did Texas Instruments calculators get so dominant that they could be the basis
for an entire game's ecosystem? How long have I been coming to the conference?
“It would have to be close to ten years I’ve been coming here. It's the opportunity
to be around people who love teaching. They love using technology to enhance learning.”
This is a clip from the annual T3 conference. It's been virtual lately,
but it is a place where Texas Instruments teaches teachers how to work with calculators.
I actually left out that the calculator was in math movement, had two giant figures:
Franklin D. Demana and Burt K. Waits. They were pioneers for math education
and wrote textbooks like this bad boy. They started a conference, Computers and
Calculators in Pre-calculus, C2P, which turned into Teachers Teaching with Technology in 1992,
T3. Really fans of letters and a little exponenty number things, I guess.
And that quickly became a Texas Instruments sponsored event.
By 1994, TI had long been on a computer education path, and calculators were an obvious next step.
The calculator development timeline lines up perfectly with the education movement,
starting with the TI-81 and improving throughout the nineties. The 1996 TI-83 was crucial for power
and gaming. Today, Texas Instruments gives teachers continuing education credits and a
certificate of attendance that they can submit to their district if they go to a conference.
They have teacher leaders too, where you can go to a training session with all expenses paid,
and they have a phone support line. To be clear, our beloved Casiovians
have something like this too, but it looks to me to be more popular internationally,
while Texas Instruments dominates the U.S. market. Is Casio pool still loading, by the way?
“All the other balls go out, and they're also traced.”
I I think you can go two ways with this. You can say that's why Texas Instruments
dominates. They paid off all the teachers and now we have calculator games because of it. And
it is true that calculators can be emulated by way cheaper web software. But I think the
truth is somewhere in the middle. I mean, they've got to learn how
to use calculators somewhere, right? Regardless of what you think, this helped
Texas Instruments become a dominant market player. So calculators were in classrooms. They were there
largely on one system. And there was a huge user base with a huge labor pool of bored students who
were probably pretty good at math. The first "Drug Wars," an adaptation of the DOS game,
showed up on the TI-82 in 1994, and things only grew as calculator power increased.
Now, I can't go through all the message boards and email lists, but programmers and collectives
quickly emerged on the burgeoning internet. Here's the site for the Icarus Collective,
which I chose at random, but you can see how they dutifully updated with their
various ports of games. And they also made valuable tools like a text editor
and compiler. All of this was perfectly timed for websites like TI-Calc.org to spread games.
I had an opportunity to play a game that was sent to me by a subscriber to this channel.
“Games on graphing calculators kickstarted my interest in programming.”
I have gotten to hear so many stories about people making their own games.
“I made an RPG where you raise a herd of frogs for 30 years and then battle
them against a rival herd called ‘Frog Wars.’”
“So, I started actually programming my own games to play and for other
people to try out that I could send the files to.”
“I did take up some time to learn TI basic for myself to make my own games and applications.”
And that is why I think calculator games matter. The forward-thinking spirit of
the 80s created this massive ecosystem of games because kids were desperate to
program something and were kind of stuck there, despite the past 30 years and the rise of things
called smartphones and programming, it turns out it's kind of important.
As we face what people currently think of as educational challenges like cheating. I think
this is really relevant. Now, I'm not so arrogant to say, "Let's change everything right now."
I've learned through researching this that there are tons of studies and papers,
and math teachers really care about their process. They've got a journal.
I had no idea about this before, but I will say that I hope people don't just focus on the
cheating enabled by new technologies. I hope they focus on the possibility instead of only
seeing drug dealers. Let's see innovators, looking really cool in their alley on their calculator.
Let's at least consider the creativity and ingenuity that these machines enable.
How much more could students create if we let them?
Thank you so much for watching this video. If you haven't been here before,
this is a personal channel where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that. Today,
I am gratuitously using a new toy that I got, maybe you can see the camera moving. Anyway,
I really want to thank you for watching this and also participating in this video.
I think this started with a poll that I put out, and then there was such a strong response
that I decided to open it up to feedback from everybody who subscribes to this channel. And
it was awesome. It took such a different angle than I would have taken otherwise,
and I got to see so many great videos and read so many responses.
So it was really cool. Thank you for that.
There is a reaction video to this one where I share some commentary about it. That's over
on Patreon. Otherwise, I'd love to know more calculator stories that you might have. I'm
sure there's a lot that people are able to share, and hopefully I'll see you in the next video.
All right. Thanks a lot for watching. Bye.