Graphing Calculator Part 3: Games!!!

For a little while now, I've been mentioning how fun graphing calculators are. However, it's still all Algebra, and lots of people don't look at the fun side of things as much. Well, we have a solution, and it's all in one button.

The button is the "apps" button. Yes, graphing calculators have an app store, so to speak. The only difference is that everything is free! They are all different tools that will assist you in math class.

Click the "probability stimulator" button after you've clicked apps. This will bring up a number of choices; marbles, spinner, coins, cards, numbers, and dice. After you choose one, just hit enter and it will spin the spinner, roll the die, draw a card, flip the coin, etc.

You can use this for one of two things. You can use it to randomly generate data. While practicing the close-together method, or squaring two-digit numbers ending in five, it is always useful to be able to randomly generate numbers. It can also be used to practice graphing scatter plots and bar graphs.

The other thing you can use it for is to play games. It is a lot more fun than it seems to just gather a bunch of friends up and call out a bunch of numbers, and then have the calculator generate some numbers to see whose number comes up first. Though it isn't extremely mathematical, it is definitely a feature of the graphing calculator that I had to share.