Archive/Current Events/2012-12-29

Sugar Digest
1. Google Code-In continues at a rapid pace. So far, we have 49 participants working on more than 160 tasks (we continue to add more tasks as the contest progresses over the next four weeks). Students have done a great job with documentation, for example, there is now a chapter in Make Your Own Sugar Activity that describes how to port from GTK2 to GTK3, a video introduction to Sugar on a Stick, and a new Turtle Art introductory guide. They have done a lot of coding: contributions such as setting the background image on the homepage; improvements to activities (1, 2). If you have suggestions for projects--easy or hard--please don't hesitate to contact me.

2. We are entering the oversight board election season. We have a nice diversity of candidates to choose from this year, including some of our key developers (one of whom has been instrumental not only in writing code, but also in mentoring other developers and one whom grew up with Sugar, bringing us the perspective of the Sugar user); a pedagogist who has been leading a weekly on-line discussion about Sugar with teachers and thought leaders (3, 4, 5); a rabble rouser; and two current members running for re-election. Ballots will be issued in the next day or two. Please vote.

3. It is beautiful and free (libre).

In the community
4. Explore a nice collection of Sugar Activity lesson plans for 1st through 5th grade designed for the OLPC Charlotte deployment.

5. Thanks to an initiative by Maria Elena, Sugar will be featured in a summer course of the Polytechnic Faculty at UNA. Martin Abente will be teaching the course.

6. Mike Lee read my book, Learning to Change the World, on his XO.

Tech Talk
7. The latest from Guzmán Trindad: physics using TurtleBlocks and Butia (6, 7).

8. Bug fixes continue to come in for Sugar 0.98.

Sugar Labs
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