Doing algebra on the HP50g

[Peter Murphy]

What I'm looking for is materials from people who have used the 50g in teaching school algebra. I'd want to see many worked examples, as in the HP50g YouTube videos by L. Linares.

I would presume that in addition to applications to straightforward algebraic tasks, there would be examples in which the 50g is used to solve problems more difficult (or just more tedious) than one would routinely see in a school setting.

An example that taught me a lot (and took me a long time) was finding a formula for the sum 1^3 + 2^3 + . . . + n^3. For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 the sums are 1, 9, 35, 100, 225. Applying the LAGRANGE command to those values yields the formula (x^4 + 2x^3 + x^2)/4; applying COLLECT to the numerator makes the formula [x^2(x+1)^2]/4, which is the form in which one usually sees it. (It's not a "secret" that LAGRANGE can do this, but seeing it done made the command's power explicit. And it took me a long time to discover that COLLECT often factors things better than FACTOR does.)