TI removes access to assembly programs on the TI-83 Premium CE
I remember, in maybe 9th grade, after learning Newton&#x27;s Method in a pre-calc course, writing a TI-83 program to do N iterations of Newton&#x27;s Method for me. I showed it to my math teacher. He wasn&#x27;t much of a nerd, and this was the early 2000s so technology wasn&#x27;t quite as prolific as it is today; he was blown away.<p>Come exam time, we were allowed to use our calculators. I asked if I should clear mine out given I had a program which could &quot;cheat&quot; (I was a teachers pet). He said something to me (privately) along the lines of, &quot;don&#x27;t worry about it. the way I see it, you&#x27;ve already proven to me you know the content.&quot; Ironically, today I could probably piece together a TI83 assembly program from memory, but I couldn&#x27;t even tell you what Newton&#x27;s Method does, let alone how to do it. Not sure what lesson to glean from that.<p>I remember eating lunch one day, maybe a year or so later, in his classroom with some friends, and he was browsing around the internet trying to find a job I&#x27;d like in math. Looking back, I find it funny that he was landing on things like &quot;actuarial science&quot; and &quot;accounting&quot; instead of the obvious. I think that was his way of trying to make up for the piss-poor guidance counseling in my school of 80 people in the middle of nowhere. I ended up wasting a semester in Computer Engineering doing CAD and coding MatLab before a professor took me aside and basically said &quot;you&#x27;re finishing these matlab assignments faster than my grad students would. Are you sure you don&#x27;t actually want to do Computer Science?&quot;<p>It sucks to see this. The accessibility of coding today has never been better, so I&#x27;m not going to pretend like this is a doomsday thing for helping kids get into the field, but it did have power in its ubiquity. Teaching computer science in high schools isn&#x27;t a tenth as effective as students coding up a program to make their math classes easier, or modding CounterStrike after hours, or &quot;hacking&quot; the school computer labs to play Halo with their friends. Technology, and the ability to shape it to help us, should be ubiquitous. It shouldn&#x27;t be thrown out the window just so one teacher can more easily proctor a hundred tests instead of twenty.