Quite frankly, I am very familiar with 3-D graphing features of Geogebra. No offense to Geogebra lovers out there (if there is any, of course), but Geogebra is like Walmart; it’s there, it’s cool, and I appreciate its existence, however, it just does not excite me.
TI-NSpire CAS CX, on the other hand, is like Trader Joes. It’s cute, innovative, fresh, and other calculators before encountering TI-NSpire are not really special anymore. If Trader Joes ever came to Waco, I would not be caught dead in Walmart. You get the point.
Technically, there is nothing “new” that I’ve learned, since most concepts have already been taught in our previous classes. Only “new” thing is how to navigate through the calculator, and that it is called the “hand-held”. Additionally, I would say whoever decided not to lay the alphabets out same as a keyboard is responsible for making the users’ brains work harder than they have to.
All jokes aside, the TI-NSpire feels like the combined version of every calculators we have used in the class. Basic calculus functions including derivatives, integrals, and limits can be done with just few buttons. Moreover, both Geogebra and TI-NSpire provide excellent visualization of 3-D graphing, which I believe that feature would be super duper helpful for those in calculus III.
Calculus III is one of those classes that will throw bunch of things at you, and nothing really makes sense. For example, I remember learning about the saddle point and staring at the white board thinking, “This is more confusing than a lady from New York walking around with a scrunchy and last season Prada shoes”. If I had a visual representation of what min & max on 3-D graph were, then my life would have been so much easier.
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