Any self-respecting geek born since the late '70s spent a lot of quality time with a Texas Instruments graphing calculator in high school (and maybe college as well). Personally, I had a TI-83. Being able to create programs taught me about simple programming languages, and my more enterprising friends got the computer-connect cable and downloaded games like Tetris off the Web, making it much easier to not study in study hall.

Now TI is unleashing a new innovation to keep their calculators standard equipment in schools for many more years. The TI-Navigator allows calculators to stream data wirelessly to a teacher's computer, showing teach just what it is you're plugging in. It should help educators see just where things are going wrong when kids aren't getting it. Plus it gives them a better chance of nabbing cheaters who develop and share programs to take the work out of math. Come to think of it, I'm kind of glad they didn't have this when I was in school or I probably would have failed trigonometry. Suckers. — Adam Frucci

Texas Instruments, via Crave