Color-Screen Graphing Calculators: An Equity Move and Special Education Support

Funded Nov 6, 2024

Thank you for your generous donation! The students at Park East High School are benefiting tremendously from the new TI-84 Plus CE calculators. The calculators have been extremely helpful during our recent unit covering graphing functions. The students learned to graph linear, quadratic, absolute value, square root, and exponential functions. The graphing calculators help students make connections between the graphs and tables of each function. It also helps student understand the properties of each type of function such as domain and range, identifying minimums and maximums, symmetry, and identifying zeros and asymptotes. One extremely useful function of the calculator is that the screens are in color which helps students compare the properties of the different types of functions when they graph them on the same axes.

Graphing is always a challenging topic for our students. Many require remediation with graphing on the x-y plane. The calculators are great tools to help our students work simultaneously with the graph and the table of the function. Students recently discovered that they could change the mode on the calculators so that they could see both the table of coordinates and the graph at the same time on the screen. This helped many of our struggling students with plotting points because as you move down the table of values you can see the coordinate move along the function's graph. This was even more beneficial when we graphed systems of equations because students had to graph two functions. The color calculators helped students keep track of which coordinates they had graphed and helped them identify the solution to the system.

As a New York City school, our Algebra students are preparing to take the New York State Regents exam in June 2025. This exam is a graduation requirement for all students. These calculators will continue to support their learning and preparation for the exam. Other topics such as univariate and bivariate statistics, comparing and contrasting linear and exponential growth, and transforming functions will be greatly supported by the new calculators. The calculator is approved for use on the New York State Algebra 1 Regents exam so students will be able to use them on the exam. Being able to provide each of our students with the TI-84 Plus CE calculators helps our students achieve their goals in the classroom and helps support student learning at home. We appreciate the donation!”

With gratitude,

Ms. Brady