An excellent way to waste time while sitting in math class. The games are typically played on a TI-8X model (TI-82, 83, 85, 86, 89 being the most common) which seem to be extremely popular in the US. The calculators being extremely tedious to program, they nevertheless provide high quality entertainment to the bored math student. Some games do not even need to be programmed, but simply random number games.

I will list a few such games here:

  • Cards of all types (blackjack and poker being the most popular in my school)
  • Duckhunt - the old classic
  • Racing games (a.k.a. ski)
  • Pong - despite a horrible framerate, I can play this for hours
  • Tetris - ditto
  • An Australian game I played before is known as calculator cricket. You keep pressing the random number button. If you get any number above 0.2 you take the first number after the decimal point and add it to your total. If you get below that you're out. Since you get a limited number of batters in cricket, if you get 10 outs you're done. Whoever has the highest total wins.

    OK we Australians like cricket. So what?