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.

That's only for TI's terrible new TI-Nspire calculators. The TI-83+ and TI-84+ series have the free TI-Connect software available.

On a z80 processor, yes; on a TI-83/+/84+/SE, sadly no. Nowhere near enough RAM and ROM, sadly.

Absolutely agreed. I just wrote a book on learning to program using graphing calculators as a springboard, entitled "Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus", which ironically ships from the bindery to stores today! I heartily recommend getting kids excited about programming with graphing calculators, and in thirteen years of volunteering my time to the community I've seen hundreds of users become calculator programmers and later engineers or software developers. Sidebar: the LCD is 96x64, or 96x120 on the TI-86.

Actually, the TI-84+/SE have a USB slave port, which with some software bitbanging enterprising community hackers have turned into a host port for HID peripherals. So the USB keyboard/mouse with a calculator is a reality. Even the "dinky" TI-83 can be made to speak PS/2 with one or two KB of assembly code.

As the author of that hack, I solidly second that suggestion. We also have a bunch of other calculator hacking projects that might interest you, like case-modding, adding features likes backlights, PS/2 ports, a touchpad, etc. There was the FloppyTunes project ( http://www.cemetech.net/projects/item.php?id=38 ) that lets you play music on a floppy drive with a calculator. Since you have so many calculators, though, CALCnet would be fun to play with, and since we're always looking for people to help with a wireless version of CALCnet, that might be something fun. And no one has written a distributed computation system with CALCnet yet!