TI’s educational coding tool plugs into your calculator

Despite all the phones and tablets out there, Texas Instruments’ graphing calculators continue to survive. The company’s latest classroom tool even turns them into a device that can teach kids coding and engineering. TI-Innovator Hub plugs into the company’s graphing calculators a lot of middle- and high-school students already have. It’s a palm-sized board with a microcontroller that gives kids a way to build simple engineering projects. They could make LEDs light up, play notes or make small toys move by plugging the components into the hub and writing a program on the calculator.

It transforms TI’s calculator into a pretty cool toy, and based on the video below, it looks like kids find it fun. “Before, I really wasn’t interested in what programming was. But after I started working with the Innovator, it was like a whole new world was opened,” one eighth grader named Jasmine Jones-Pas said. As a nice plus, it’s enclosed in a durable case, since the hub was designed for kids. The bad news is you can’t get one for yourself — it’s not out for sale online or in retail stores and is only available from instructional product dealers.

Source: Texas Instruments