There is an increasing body of good stuff available for this series of
calculators. It is mostly at the upper reaches of our curriculum, but that's
certainly true about Derive, Maple, Mathematica, et al. None of them are very
user friendly for non-techies.
The script feature seems to be underutilized on these calculators. It allows
one to help students along a line of problem solving reasoning without writing
a program and without putting them in a lockstep program. There is no reason
that good scripts developed by you couldn't be used in any level math course,
and getting students to use them might be easier than taking them to the lab
and training them on your computer system.
Be sure to budget training funds for whatever you do, or it won't get used. A
calculator for every faculty member and a classroom set costs less than the
licensing for most of the big packages. You'll still need training or
missionary work to get them used.
George Dorner
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