Archive/Current Events/2010-06-10

Sugar Digest
1. Paraguay educa team conducted a two-week workshop on Sugar Activity development. It is great that deployments are facilitating local Activity development—many of our most popular activities have come from downstream, which is exactly as it should be.

The Paraguay course was taught by Raúl Gutierrez, Bernie Innocenti, Martin Abente, and Jorge Saldivar. They covered all the basics and broke the students into project teams, which resulted in four new activities: Scrabble, Pintando Fracciones, SugarBrain, and Conozco. (The detailed syllabus is available on their wiki.)

Raúl raised an interesting question on IRC (and subsequently in email) about issuing a certification of participation in the class. It has been a goal that as Sugar deployments expand, affiliates of Local Sugar Labs would offer services. We have a mechanism for approving the creation of local labs. Is that mechanism adequate, or should we have a separate mechanism for approving the certifications they award? (As someone who would be looking to hire a developer, it would be reassuring to know that Sugar Labs has confidence in their skills. This would suggest that there be a community-based process in place.)

In the case of Moodle, only selected "Moodle Partners" can officially certify a developer's skills in Moodle-based e-learning. They have a "rigorous and highly-regarded assessment programme developed by the international Moodle community." We have no such rigorous Sugar assessment program, but perhaps the Activity Team should develop one. In the meantime, I am in favor of deferring to our local Sugar Labs.

2. Meanwhile, we have surpassed the 3-million-served mark on our activity portal.

3. CeibalJam, a community-based group in Uruguay, which was recently acknowledged by Ars Electronica, has made yet another contribution: JAMedia, an advanced multimedia player for Sugar. (See it in action on YouTube.)

Features include:


 * multiple audio formats
 * multiple video formats
 * on-line radio
 * on-line streaming video

4. Last week we announced Sugar-on-a-Stick Mirabelle. This week, Thomas C Gilliard announced a revised Sugar-Creation-Kit DVD for downloading for "sneakernet" and behind-firewall installs. From one download, you have everything you need to locally build a complete environment for Sugar. See http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/SugarCreationKit09-Contents.txt for details.

5. Alas, I was unable to attend the recent Deployment Team meeting, but Tabitha Roder took detailed notes. It reads like a great start to addressing the questions of how we build a bridge between developers and deployments and between deployments themselves. Thanks to all who attended and to Raul for organizing it.

In the community
6. Sugar will be represented at Linux Tag 2010(June 9–12 in Berlin).

7. Sugar World Cup 2010 will be held from 11 June to 11 July.

Tech talk
8. Aleksey Lim has been working on the Sugar 0install version of Open Office for Kids. See.

9. I added a few new features to the Abacus activity, including a binary abacus and an abacus that lets you add fractions, e.g., 1/2+1/3+1/6.

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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