Do you have any knowledge whether there's still much of this going on?

I remember futzing around with TI Basic and downloading/sharing more complex games from others... but we didn't have smartphones then. I just wonder to what extent students still care about that stuff today.

I suppose there's still some appeal from the "look like you're doing work" factor if nothing else.

The Raspberry Pi Pico has opened the door to young experimenters thanks to the MMBasic programming language from Geoff Graham. There are several excellent videos that explain the setup and operation. The Pico is actually available for $4. The software and manual (PDF) are free to download. It is super easy to get started - 5 minutes and you're writing software that can solve problems and control I/O.

PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM

PicoMiteVGA Raspberry Pi Pico Running BASIC on VGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIK1ujslHHI

....

Yes yes, but the pico is a lot harder to program during class while looking like you are doing school work.

It's funny reading this thread where everyone is leaning towards "those dang kids and their smartphones are missing out" while ignoring things like Roblox, where entire economies are being built of the creativity of kids

I don’t want economies, I want kids to have genuine, self-directed creative outlets. At best today Roblox is baby’s first hustle culture.

You're kidding right?

Having "Robux" instead of the imaginary karma random forums, or the points different game portals had, or literally just the grind for downloads some people had somehow dashes the incredible stuff kids are inventing for play by other kids?

Kids will not somehow be ruined by having an outward reward for the creativity. It doesn't work like that.

Just to clarify, I don't mean that kids are not programming or making games in whatever form, just that they might not care to do so on a frozen-in-time TI calculator as much as used to be the case, so the "silver lining" of an unnecessarily expensive TI calculator being a child's first programming environment might not really exist anymore. As you say, kids have many other options today.

My son just finished 9th grade and wanted to know about machine language and assembly language. I got him a Digirule 2U from bradsprojects and it clicked immediately. He wrote his first programs by hand and bit-banged them from the front panel, just like I once did on a Cosmac ELF. He found bugs and patched his programs. By playing with it, he learned about addressing modes, self-modifying code, the usefulness of a stack for implementing function calls... all of this he taught himself, in the space of a few afternoons. And just as he understood that programming like this was becoming very tedious, I showed him a symbolic assembler.

Looking on Amazon... TI calculators are running Python nowadays. Much easier to understand but C would be a much better introduction to computing for them :(

TI has never supported C on its calculators. That's part of the fun :)

It supported Assembly officially, which is better to learn how computers actually work, although they seem to have dropped support for it recently.

Oh I thought they'd changed since I was at school :) In my day they only had ASM. Only my C64 was way more capable / interesting.

The NSpire was running Lua at one point…