and on the topic of calculators in high school maths, the NumWorks calculator is so far ahead of the TI-84 despite being allowed on the same tests. It honestly feels like an advantage over my peers… it can literally do more, and faster. It was a big shock when I realized handheld calculators don’t have to suck. Highly recommend.
On the TI-84, there was a lot of great third-party software you could load onto the calculator. When I was in school, I had a fair few useful and not-so-useful things loaded onto my TI-84, including a copy of Symbolic, which gave the TI-84 some limited symbolic calculus functionality. I don't remember much else of what I had. Rather than use the calculator to help with repetitive math, though, what I really wound up doing most of the time is messing around in TI Basic instead of doing my work.
I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make TI Basic programs fast enough to do games. Graph drawing commands were too slow!
I realized that for most things text was the right way to go, but eventually I did manage to make a facsimile of Pong that was decently fast in graph mode by simply drawing each frame incrementally rather than clearing and redrawing it each time. Pretty obvious in retrospect, but I was still relatively new to programming when I first started messing with TI Basic.
I also struggled to write shared routines with only goto, so my code was a catastrophic mess. I assume most TI Basic code was, though.
