Texas Instruments Corporation

Todd D Fortenberry

Malgorzata Anna Brothers

Floyd R Gerwig

J Douglas Child

Laura K Harvey

David Ross Stoutemyer

The present invention discloses the use of a hand-held calculator programmed to teach subject matter such as mathematics in a manner that emulates traditional step-by-step teacher-student teaching methods and shows the important intermediate steps. The method evaluates a selected problem against a master set of possible operations, organized according to a hierarchy that can be applied to the problem and then provides choices of several operations that are applicable or can operate on a selected problem. Importantly, the choices available to the student will not always lead to a solution or simplification of the problem. This allows the student to see the effect of a good choice, as well as a poor choice. If the problem can be operated on further, the results of the previous operations have a new problem or expression to be solved. This repetitive process continues until there are no further operations possible that will move the problem closer to a final solution.

Use of a directed acyclic organization structure for selection and execution of consistent subsets of rewrite rules

A hand-held calculator programmed to teach mathematics in a manner which emulates traditional step-by-step teacher-student teaching methods and shows the important intermediate steps. Using linked lists, the method allows the use of selected data sets of problems and provides choices of mathematical operations, including transformations which are applicable or can operate on a selected problem. Importantly, the choices available to the student will not always lead to a solution or simplification of the problem. This allows the student to see the effect of an improper choice, as well as a proper choice.

Hand-held calculator with problems and operations linked lists

An algorithm and handheld device adapted to select a subexpression of a mathematical expression. An expression string of the handheld device is selected, and the expression string is converted to a contiguous tokenized Polish representation (CTPR) of the expression, and the CTPR of the expression is loaded into an n-ary tree. The user may navigate the visual representation of the expression to select a subexpression. The handheld device is adapted to select the subexpression from the n-ary tree.

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McKinney, TX, United States of America

Todd D Fortenberry