One Day Workshop on Scilab
4th May 2019
A one day Workshop on Scilab for teachers was conducted by Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay on 4th May 2019 at Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon through ICT under the aegis of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teachers and Teaching (PMMMNMTT), funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.
30 participants from Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon and other colleges from NCR attended the workshop. The workshop was coordinated by Prof. Chandra Shekhar Singh, HOD, Department of ECE/EEE, Dronacharya college of Engineering, Gurgaon.
Meeting started with interactive session conducted by Prof. Kannan Moudgalya, Principal Investigator, NVLI and Spoken Tutorial Project, IIT Bombay. Several queries of the participants regarding the utility and significance of Scilab were answered by Prof. Kannan Moudgalya and his team. Prof. Kannan Moudgalya explained the utility of Scilab. He told Scilab is a free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and uses the state of the art numerical libraries, such as LINPACK, EISPACK and LAPACK, and hence, its results are highly reliable. Beside this, Scilab implements the user friendly language, similar to the one used in the popular software Matlab. But unlike Matlab, Scilab can be freely downloaded, freely copied, freely modified and also freely distributed. Scilab comes with a graphical programming interface Xcos, which is similar to simulink. A good knowledge of Scilab will help improve the employment potential of students. He also mentioned that Spoken Tutorial method offers hands-on practice, with 100% active learning, those who undergo this training will be able to start using Scilab immediately after the workshop.
After the interactive session, Scilab training was conducted for five hours through spoken tutorials with help from coordinator, already trained at IIT Bombay. The spoken tutorials consisted of various levels starting from the basic level, i.e. Vector Operations, Matrix Operations, Conditional branching, Iterations, Scripts and Functions, Plotting 2D graphs, Introduction to Xcos. The basic level was followed by intermediate level, which included file handling, user defined input and output, integration, solving non-linear equations, linear equations - Gaussian methods etc. The participants also asked various questions regarding the problems they faced during the training assignments, from Scilab team at IIT Bombay.
After the Scilab training, an interactive session was conducted by Prof. Kannan Moudgalya, IIT Bombay with participants on their queries on Scilab workshop.
The workshop proved to be very informative and helpful in giving participants a quick Scilab training at basic and intermediate level.