If you've never done
Animation on
TI Calculators, don't worry, it's a
peace of cake. Although, in order to follow this, you need to already know about two
things:
1. How to create a new program
2. While loops
That's all you need. Now, you've probably used Disp before, which puts one line of text on the screen. Notice that when you use the Disp command, each line goes after the next, you can have differetn pieces of text appear on different parts of the screen. Well, that's what the Output (may want to check that node for technical syntax info) command is for. Unlike Disp, you have to specify three things to output:
Output x, y, "Text"
NOTE: On TI-83s and several others, You have to have a parenthesis: Output(x,y,"Text)
X and Y are the coordinates where you want the text to appear. You should consult the manual for your calculator to find out how large the screen is. If you try and specify a coordinate off the screen, you will get a ERROR: DOMAIN message. Now, on a TI-89 calculator, the screen is 78x159. So to display a message at the center of the screen, you could do:
Output 78/2,159/2, "Hello World!"
Now, you can specify variables instead of numbers as coordinates. For example:
a = 78/2
b = 159/2
Output a,b,"Hello World!"
Now, all you have to do to make an animation, is put Output in a While loop, and have the variables value change each time the loop runs. For example:
a = 0
While a < 10
Output a,1,"C"
a+1->a
EndWhile
This will make a train of Cs across the screen. However, the C doesn't appear to be moving. It just looks like we made a bunch of Cs. You'll have to put a ClrIO (or ClrHome for TI-83s and the like) statement inside the loop, to make it appear to move across the screen. What will happen, is that it will draw a 'C', delete it, draw a second 'C' a little farther to the right, repeat. Like this:
a = 0
While a < 10
Output a,1,"C"
a+1->a
ClrIO
EndWhile
Experiment to make some wild and crazy animations. For a really good example of what you can do, check out TI-89 Matrix.