Product Review: TI-89 Titanium Graphing Calculator

 

This is probably one of the most powerful calculators out there, and as such you may or may not be able to use it in your classes (at least on quizzes and exams). If you are just taking algebra then this may be overkill for you because the real powerful features come when you get into calculus. It has algebraic symbolic capabilities, meaning it can solve equations and take derivatives and do most integrals for you, and give an exact answer not just a numeric approximation. It will not show you the steps, but it will give you the answers. Some teachers will not let students use it, even though just writing down the answer without showing any work will rarely (if ever) get you any points. One thing it is definitely good for even if you cannot use it on exams is for checking your work (especially when you are working on even number problems from the book).

There are a couple drawbacks to the calculator though. Sometimes, with very complicated derivatives and integrals the format of the answer will be given differently than what your book may simplify it to, and it is not always easy to see that it is a comparable result. This can be especially problematic when you have to do online homework and the program is picky about how the answer is entered. Second, if you are taking multivariable calculus, while this can graph three-dimensional functions, it gives you a very basic wireframe graph, that is hard to see the shape much less do any kind of analysis of it. Also, there are some functions that you can only access going into the catalog, and are not contained in the math, algebra, or calculus menus, so they can take a while to find. Most of the higher-level operations that you will use this for are however found in one of those menus.

If you are taking linear algebra and/or differential equations it is great. Once you learn how to enter the rows and columns of the matrices, you can do it very quickly off the home screen and row reduce or calculate the determinant in seconds. It can also solve first and second-order differential equations, which helped me immensely on my diff eq final, because I had one problem that I could not figure out initially, but I could see what the answer was, and as a result finally figured out how to get to it doing integration by substitution.

Overall, I think this is a great investment. It is not perfect, but for the price, it will help you, especially if you are in a program where you have to take advanced math classes.