Introduction

Introduction

Three trends that are seen with STEM education, that are evident even at the secondary education level are the moves toward introducing computer programming in schools, introducing scientific computing in schools and the use of mobile technologies in schools.  We illustrate the versatility of the Scilab scientific computing environment as not only a powerful enterprise computing tool but one which is quite suited to introduce high schoolers to scientific computing and programming, and in particular on a mobile platform using cloud computing.  We illustrate the power of the Scilab platform addressing each of these three features by applying its capabilities to solving simple weighted voting system problems.

1. The trend to programming in high school.

Consider the aims of the code.org consortium: “Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code.”  Its goals include,

• Bringing Computer Science classes to every K-12 school in the United States, especially in urban and rural neighborhoods

• Changing policies in all 50 states to categorize Computer Science as part of the math/science "core" curriculum

2. The trend to scientific computing in high schools.

Scilab, for instance, is installed in Chinese and French high schools and is recognized of pedagogical interest by the French Ministry of Education. In the US some AP statistics teachers use a similar powerful open source statistical computing and programming environment, called R to introduce statistical computing and graphics.  There are also cloud based versions of the R statistical platform. Another powerful open source platform is the Sage mathematical software suite that is also being promoted to teach calculus in schools. Its strengths include powerful graphics, the Python programming environment and unlike Matlab and Scilab which are primarily computational, Sage also has sophisticated computer algebra capabilities similar to those in Maple or Mathematica. Sage features are also available in the cloud.

3. The trend to mobile computing

Students and scholars today use a variety of mobile devices for queries including mathematics, making use of such paid or free services or apps like wolframalpha.com and Math Ref. wolframalpha.com is a cloud-based service.  With an Internet connection, including through a mobile device queries can be made to harness the computational power of the wolframalpha.com server/engine.  Scilab, R, and Sage, can also be leveraged using cloud based services.  In this paper we focus on Scilab, deployed either on a standalone, or used in the cloud through a browser from a mobile device.  It can be argued that cloud computing is a trend that may compete, if not displace, the apps paradigm for mobile devices. As an alternative to installing apps on a mobile device a user with an Internet connection and a browser interface may choose the computing power offered through a cloud computing service.

In this paper we illustrate the uses of an open source scientific platform like Scilab both as a numerical computational tool as well as a high level programming environment suitable for all users from school users through enterprise users.  We illustrate the features using both a) the standalone installation of Scilab, and (b) deploying Scilab instructions through the cloud using the browser on an Internet-connected browser.

We begin by introducing the Scilab scientific computing and programming platform.