Introduction to TI-BASIC

This page will introduce you to the concept of TI-BASIC, as well as how to start your first program.

What is TI-BASIC?

TI-BASIC, to put it briefly, is the language made by Texas Instruments for their graphing calculators. Despite this, it can do quite a bit in terms of calculations and games.

To make a program in TI-BASIC, you need to follow these steps:

Turn on your calculator.
Press the PRGM button.
Press the right arrow twice to go to the NEW menu.
Press enter.
Name your program.
Start programming.

Great job! Now, you're in the right place to begin typing code, so let's learn our first piece of code!

:Disp "HELLO WORLD"

This is how you display "Hello World" in TI-BASIC, and this is what it looks like when you run it.

A screen-cap of a TI-84 Plus running a program saying "HELLO WORLD" — Fig. 1

We can make this fairly easily. Start by making a program named "INTRO". In this program, press the PRGM button again. This will send you to a menu with many commands that you can put into the source code. Press the right arrow and then the 3 key. This will input the command "Disp"—which is short for "Display"—into the program. From there, you can use ALPHA to type '"HELLO WORLD"' into the program. Make sure to surround it with double quotes. You may now go to the home screen by pressing 2ND and then the MODE button.

You can run your program by going into the PRGM menu from the home screen and selecting your program in the "EXEC" portion of the menu. Then, press ENTER on the home screen to run the program.

Congratulations! You've made your first program! You can swap out the text that says "HELLO WORLD" in the source code by going into the PRGM menu and pressing the right arrow to go to the EDIT portion, or you can leave it like it is.

You can go to the next page here.