I've spoken to countless now-engineers and professional programmers who started learned programming by playing around with graphing calculators. They're ubiquitous, your audience is huge, and the built-in TI-BASIC language is surprisingly powerful. I'd definitely recommend he pursue that as a means to learn to think like a programmer, skills like structuring programs, prototyping with pseudocode, debugging, and all that. In fact, I wrote a book teaching those very skills. Alternatively, Python is a great beginner computer language in that the syntax is clear and cruft-free (yes, Java, I'm looking at public static void main()...) and crashes are generally graceful and easy-to-debug.

I'm amused how many people overlooked the fact that although all the links on the page go to jpl.nasa.gov, the site itself is fake. Didn't the Mardi Gras beads give it away?

That we don't know yet, but we strongly suspect they will. Unless things go terribly wrong, though, they won't be locking it down the way they locked down the Nspire.

Since i posted this article, we discovered many things: - The TI-84+CSE will have a z80 processor, same as the TI-82, TI-83, and TI-83+/84+ - It will have an Nspire-esque rechargeable battery - It will have a TI-84+/SE-compatible OS, so the same math books and lessons will work with it.