Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.

In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.

We made multi-player games over the link cables in the early 1990s. We certainly learned a ton from building those. It's not clear how much the calculators added to the math and chemistry classes where we were supposed to use them.

You could get that same educational value from programming things on a smartphone.

Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.

That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).

The interface is great for what it does though. I still use ti-83 interface with the calculator app on my phone.

My high school required one for a math curriculum that was specifically designed with the idea that students would not need advanced math classes. It kids up for failure if they were hoping to move toward higher level math in college, as the fundamentals were never adequately taught. But at least they sold thousands of calculators to kids who would never use them again.

They actually started us on them in 7th or 8th grade.

Same. I hid custom calculators behind game levels so my teacher couldn't find them.

Same.

I distinctly remember my teachers having a debate around whether or not the functions I had programmed into my calculator were "cheating". On one hand, it was a tool and notes that I had access to my peers did not. On the other hand, I had created those tools myself, and if school was supposed to train me for the real world, wouldn't I be able to use the tools I created in the real world?

There are many of us, I make a living today because my dad brought home a Ti-83 Plus and I kept messing with the "PGRM" menu

I had the same one. I thought it was pretty cool.

One perk I found is that if I kept it in RPN mode, people stopped asking to borrow my calculator, which was a valid excuse to learn how to use RPN, which is basically all I use now (and indirectly made me really love the Forth language).

Mine was a Casio fx-something. Teachers didn't like it but it didn't let me cheat and it was just the right amount of functionality to help me with math. Carried me through Pre-Cal, Trig, Calculus and Differential Equations.

A lack of functionality is the point. You don't want a full CAS or Internet search results available, or many students will just take the easy route and not learn anything.

Neither teachers nor school districts have the time or resources to audit every new tool someone wants to use, or to help students figure out how to use their preferred tool to do something - find something that works and just use that

How is that possible?

I wouldn’t have been able to function without it in school (20 years ago). But we also didn’t have iPhones.

I used mine in highschool (20 years ago) and still use one today.

I use mine constantly in high school (now).

Same. But I agree with the parent, I always got the vibe it was a giant racket between public schools and TI. Writing code for it was probably cool back in the 80s-90s but it's so dated now.