Archive/Current Events/2008-08-18

Sugar Digest
1. Worth a read: Dave Farning sent a pointer to an Open University report on "the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning community in formal educational settings" (Please see FLOSSCOM Phase 2 Report). While the focus is on higher education, what I found of particular relevance is the discussion of collaboration and reflection in FOSS projects and its potential transfer to the classroom.

Community jams and meetups
2. Game Jam Peru: Hernán Paches announces an upcoming Game Jam at the Universidad de San Martín de Porres in Lima on 23–25 October.

Tech Talk
3. Sucrose final release: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar community is working on the final release (0.82) for the Sucrose (Please see the Sugar Timeline).

4. Dr. Geo: Hilaire Fernandes is looking for feedback on some screencasts he has been preparing to explain the DrGeo features (Please see DrGeo screencast).

5. "Hard fun": Mark Goadrich and his student Nolan Baker are seeking feedback on three educational games (COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell Management) they have been developing for Sugar this summer (Please see COBBLE; Space Tag; and Cell Management).

6. x2o: Alex Levenson reports the first release of x2o, a physics problem solving game in which you create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to get the O to land on top of the X (Please see X2o).

7. Sugar-presence-service: Guillaume Desmottes reports that a new release of the Suagr Presence Service is available (Please see sugar-presence-service-0.82.1.tar.bz2). This is the "Woo I'm stable!" release. 8. Activity updates: Read 49; Terminal 15; Log 12; Pippy 24; Calculate 21; Etoys 87; Write 57; Browse 95; and Journal 97.

9. Wine: John Gilmore is seeking feedback as to what class of MS-Windows programs would be of high-priority for Sugar users. (Please see Sugared Wine for more information about Wine, a GNU LGPL licensed implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix and Sugar).

10. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports "significant support" for 18 languages (not including English) for Sugar 0.82:

Thanks to all the translation teams for their hard work.

Sugar Labs
11. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). Sugar and Work are surrounded by OLPC, lab, education, development, and community.