Angle mode switching

[Peggy Frisbie]

My students and I wish that there were a faster way to switch angle modes on the TI-nspire. My colleague suggested this morning adding a third row to the Trig pop-up menu, with Deg, Rad, and Grad on the bottom row for quick switching.

We thought we would put that out as an idea to TI for a future operating system update. The current method of Doc menu, Settings, Document Settings, tab to the second row, cursor right, then up or down, and enter takes a minimum of 7 keystrokes by my count, and the Doc menu is not an obvious choice to students. A trig menu solution would probably take not more than 5 keystrokes in the worst case, and has the advantage of being located in a logical place.

Peggy

[Mark Arguijo]

You can click on the gear icon in the top right and that brings up the document settings and you can change the angle mode from there.  And since 4.0, you have the angle mode displayed in the top right also. 

Hope it helps. 

Mark Arguijo

Sent from my iPhone

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[Dennis Donovan]

I agree that with all the great thing we can do with the TI-Nspire, the most frustrating thing about the handheld is switching modes between degrees and radians.  The TI-Nspire just plainly does a horrible job of providing a way for students to quickly transition modes from one to the other.

That being said, I have found a few ways to work around.

The first is to have the students leave the default for all documents in radian mode, but create one document called "degree mode" where they change the angle to degrees, this can be easily accomplished by opening a new document and opening a Calculator page, change the document settings-> angle to degrees, then open a Graphs page and go to Menu->Settings and change angle to Degree, then go to Menu->Window/Zoom->Window Settings and change the window to [-360,360] for the xmin, xmax.  Then save the document to "Degree Mode".

The second is to, again, leave the document settings in radian mode, but use the degree symbol when you want to execute trig. functions in degree mode.  I have attached a 1 page document that shows this. The degree symbol is on the pi key and the "conversion" symbol (solid arrow/right facing triangle) is on the Ctrl-Catalog key (Alpha, Beta, Degree).  It would be nice if this "conversion" symbol were on the pi key as well since there is an open spot on that pop-up menu.  Note to convert to degrees as I showed in the inverse sine command, you can type the "dd" in lower case, the handheld convert that to upper case when you hit Enter.  Also, using nsolve() with the degree symbol on the variable, I have found that for some angles (solutions) it doesn't work, this usually comes up when solving a Law of Cosines problem for the angle, the second method using nsolve() shown (using the conversion) will work for all angles.

Hope this helps.

Dennis Donovan

T3 Regional Instructor

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From: Peggy Frisbie <peggyf...@gmail.com>
To: tinspire <tins...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 1, 2016 6:45 AM
Subject: [tinspire] Angle mode switching

My students and I wish that there were a faster way to switch angle modes on the TI-nspire. My colleague suggested this morning adding a third row to the Trig pop-up menu, with Deg, Rad, and Grad on the bottom row for quick switching.

We thought we would put that out as an idea to TI for a future operating system update. The current method of Doc menu, Settings, Document Settings, tab to the second row, cursor right, then up or down, and enter takes a minimum of 7 keystrokes by my count, and the Doc menu is not an obvious choice to students. A trig menu solution would probably take not more than 5 keystrokes in the worst case, and has the advantage of being located in a logical place.

Peggy

[John Hanna]

I saw a TI-83 Premium from France at T3IC… you should see what it does with trig values!

 

Best Regards,

         John Hanna

         jeh...@optonline.net

         www.johnhanna.us

         T³ - Teachers Teaching with Technology

         http://education.ti.com

[Sean Bird]

I hear you also in that a student may think they have changed the angle setting in documents, but they go to a Graph or Geometry and it needs to be changed from menu > Settings instead of Doc > Settings > Document Settings.

Here are a couple of current solutions I would suggest until a day comes that clicking the degree unit at the top allows you to change the setting corresponding to the page you are on (I like Dennis Donovan's idea too):

1. With 4.2 OS Teacher Software or TI-Navigator it is super easy to give every student the document settings you want them to have. (This doesn't effect the Graph page.)

2. Make a file that is degrees the way you want. This is a good idea since there will be times that you may want to reset a calculator.

3. I am a big proponent of using units. Press the pi button and put the degree symbol when you want to use degrees. This works even if using a variable, like on a graph page do sin(x degrees)

4. Let me strongly advocate for the use of Notes page. Want to change the attributes of a Math Box? Press ctrl menu (right-click). See the attached tns file for example of this and a beneficial application.

- Sean Bird

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Sean Bird
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Psalm 111:2 “Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them.”

[Gabriel]

So i tried to write an program with setMode, but set mode just changes the type inside programs or functions sadly...

So the TI nspire is a great calculator, but some things are very strange... e.g. the lack of an dedictaed solver (people who knew HP 48,49 od 50 will understand) or a simple method to change between rad, grd etc....

[Kim]

For what purpose do you want to switch the modes?

I teach both Calculus students (always in radians) and geometry students (don't use radians) and have never switched the modes on my class set of calculators.

What I do instead is to teach my students to use the degree notation.  If they are to take a sine of an angle they must indicate that the angle is in degrees.  The degree symbol will then override the mode setting and perform the calculation in degrees.  This way they are paying attention to numbers and we are attending to precision.

When using inverse trig I teach them how to find the conversion symbol in the calculator (that bolded triangle ) and we use the command convert to DMS for degrees, minutes and seconds.  It makes a nice connection to navigation.  The graphing defaults in the geometry page are in degrees and for function graphs you use the degree symbol if you are graphing in degrees. 

Other than the DMS command, everything is just proper math and I have never had an issue.  If I get to the students early enough, there are no problems for the physics students and we never worry about what mode we are in because the students are using the proper notation.

There is also a Convert to DD which is decimal degrees that I have used in the recent past. 

I have attached screen shots.  The scree shots are from a CAS calculator, but I use the numerics in class and students have no issues.

The conversion triangle can be used for other things.  I would like to hear from others if they use it in their classes.

[Hartman, Bruce]

I use Kim's work around in my classes.  The only issue I have is when doing inverse trig functions, students need to remember if no units it's in radians and need to take the extra step to convert to DD.

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[Sean Bird]

Quite right.

Visual aid:

I often use the conversion operator at the top of ctrl catalog's symbols.

But when using software I enjoy the shortcut @>