The DRAW Menu on a TI-84: Line, Circle, Tangent, and Shade

DRAW lives at 2ND + PRGM, and it’s easy to overlook because it’s not something a typical homework problem calls for by name — but the tools inside are useful anytime you need to annotate a graph rather than just plot one.

The tools

• Line( — draws a straight segment between two points you select on the graph screen. Freehand, not tied to any function.
• Circle( — same idea: click a center, then a point on the edge, and it draws the circle through that radius.
• Tangent( — the one actually tied to a function. Point it at a graphed curve and an x-value, and it draws the tangent line at that point and reports the slope — a visual, one-step version of what nDeriv( gives you as a bare number. (More on that overlap in Derivatives, Integrals, and Limits on a TI-84.)
• Shade( — fills the region between two functions (or between a function and the x-axis) over a given x-range. Useful for visualizing the area a fnInt( calculation is actually measuring.

There are a few more DRAW items beyond these four — Horizontal/Vertical draw reference lines at a fixed y or x value, and Text( places a label directly on the graph — but Line, Circle, Tangent, and Shade are the ones that come up in practice.

Clearing it afterward

Everything drawn this way sits on top of the graph as a separate layer — it doesn’t touch your Y= functions or window settings. DRAW → 1: ClrDraw wipes all of it in one step without affecting anything else.

Try it yourself

The TI-84 calculator here has the same four tools under Graph mode → Draw tools: Line, Circle, and Shade work by clicking points directly on the canvas the same way as the physical device, and Tangent reports both the tangent line and its slope when you click a point on a graphed curve.