Archive/Current Events/2009-06-15

Sugar Digest
1. In a week full of accomplishments, one event stands out. Caroline Meeks has received a grant from the Gould Foundation in support of the Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot at a Boston public elementary school. We'll begin the pilot by participating in a five-week summer program, which will inform a school-wide program in the fall. In a related effort, we will also be working at a Boston public middle school program; these students will be making "how to" videos of Sugar as guides for the elementary school students and teachers.

2. María del Pilar Sáenz announced the official launch of Fundación Sugar Labs Colombia. The foundation, the first "official" local lab, has been busy: working in partnership with Foundation Buinaima, they have a project approved by the Secretaría de Educación de Bogotá to install and use Sugar in 12 public schools. They have already been working with more than 30 teachers, with whom they will be exploring pedagogy in the classroom over the next six months. The foundation will also help with the use of additional resources, e.g., wikis and blogs, with the goal of the teachers becoming part of the Sugar community.

3. Jeff Elkner has gotten Sugar Labs DC off to a great start this summer: he has launched an intern program modeled after Google Summer of Code. Pairing students and developers is a great opportunity for learning and a great way to grow the community.

4. Aleksey Lim has uploaded Bruno Coudoin's award-winning GCompris activities to http://actvities.sugarlabs.org. The inclusion of these 100+ activities doubles the number of activities available for download from our download site.

5. Some wonderful guides to using Sugar activities has been made available online by the Ministry of Education in Peru. Even if you don't speak Spanish, it is worth looking at the material available at http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/OLPC_fichasfasc.html.

Help Wanted
6. David (nubae) Van Assche organized a collaboration testing sprint; together we exercised a number of activities on the openSUSE Sugar image. We plan to continue testing again on Wednesday, 17 June, at 20:00 UTC, irc.freenode.org, channel #sugar-collaboration.

In the community
7. If you are planning to attend Linuxtag (24–27 June in Berlin) please add your name to the wiki. There will be a Sugar Labs booth.

8. Other upcoming events include FOSSED in Bethel, Maine, 24–26 June and NECC in Washington DC, 28 June–1 July.

9. Jim Gettys is looking for submissions to the Linux Plumbers Conference, 23–25 September 2009 in Portland, Oregon USA. He is particularly interested in the Sugar collaboration framework.

10. There is an article about Sugar in the latest issue of LWN.

Tech Talk
11. Sebastian Dziallas announced this new Sugar-on-a-Stick snapshot (Live Image, Virtual Appliance, Boot Helper). Features include:


 * Fixed DPI size issue on the XO - should look better now;
 * Included Library and Tux Paint; updated Record activity;
 * updated Turtle Art to the latest version.

12. Thanks to the efforts of Aleksey Lim, activities.sugarlabs.org uses email notifications to announce new releases. So the activity developer need only upload new activity/new-activity-version, fill in release notes field and this information will be sent to sugar-devel@ mailing list.

Sugar Labs
13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).