Adopting Smartphones as mobile computational laboratory for students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds

Computational approaches has become an integral part of STEM. For some years, we have adopted QPython which is the Python version in smartphones for the teaching of our computational courses. The reason is that while some students from low economic backgrounds cannot afford their own laptops or desktops, most students already have these smartphones because there are inexpensive models to purchase and they are acquired for many other purposes. The implication is that our students irrespective of their cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, can partake in our computational courses. Now in addition to the slimmed version of Microsoft Office in the smartphones, slimmed versions of a number of programming languages are already being incorporated into the smartphones whose capacities are continually advanced. Therefore, we are expanding our project to be an all inclusive such that smartphones will be adopted to be a mobile computational laboratory. Thus the goals of this project include promoting access, inclusion, equity and diversity related to supporting students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.