Archive/Current Events/2012-04-30

Sugar Digest
1. Over last weekend, OLPC hosted a documentation sprint at their Cambridge office. It was great to meet a number of new-to-me faces, including Craig Perue and Mark Battley, with whom I enjoyed a great conversation about how we can make Sugar (and Sugar documentation) more useful. As a result, we are trending more towards documenting not just what and how, but also why and how. Many thanks to Adam Holt for organizing the event and also to everyone who participated -- those who came from long distances, such as Nancie Severs, Bill Stelzer, Sameer Verma, Christoph Derndorfer, Laura de Reynal, and Ed Cherlin, as well as those who participated remotely, such as Caryl Bigenho. The results can be seen in refreshed wiki pages and a new Help activity.

2. Claudia Urrea and I spend the first half of the week in Managua with Felix Garrido and the deployment team at Fundación Zamora Terán. The overall purpose of the visit was to discuss strategies for evaluation in light of the foundation's recent expansion of its laptop program to the Island of Ometepe. I spent some time acquainting the learning team with the latest feature of the Portfolio tool and some enhancements to Sugar that will "make learning visible" not just to administrators, but also to the learners themselves. While we were there, also I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Drake and consume some taco soup.

During the conversation with the learning team, the topic of nutrition came up. FZT is working with USAID on a nutrition curriculum. We discussed ways to integrate the curriculum into Sugar, by for example, using the Turtle Art Food Plugin. I was inspired by our discussion of the Food Pyramid, so on the flight back to Boston, I wrote a new activity, Activities/Nutrition. What is potentially fun about it is that not only can you explore the precompiled database of foods, but you can also load your own foods into the database. So, for example, a child could take a photo (using Record) or draw a picture (using Paint) of dinner, and then load that food into the activity.

3. The Scratch team has updated their license documentation such that it is once again compatible with Sugar's Free Software guidelines. Please see.

4. There continues to be growing interest in localizing Sugar to indigenous languages. The latest project is with the Nahuatl language. The work is being done in cooperation with the State Government in San Luis Potosí through the Secretary of Education, the Universidad Politécnica de San Luis Potosí (UPSLP), the Instituto de Lenguas Indígenas. There is also interest in starting a program in the Xi'úi languaje (Pame).

In the community
5. Details for eduJAM! the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo are available. eduJAM will be followed by a code sprint on the 13th and 14th.

6. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 17-19) and May 21-22 in Buenos Aires.

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list:

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