Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

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===Sugar Digest===
 
===Sugar Digest===
  
1. A dear friend and mentor, [http://community.adn.com/adn/node/141909 Henry Aristide “Red” Boucher], died yesterday at the age of 88. Red taught me never to say never. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious and his capacity to do the right thing was boundless. I'll miss him.
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1. It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.  
  
2. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Sebastian Dziallas and the Sugar community, Sugar Labs announces the availability of Sugar on a Stick, codenamed "Strawberry". It features the latest version of the Sugar desktop environment—Version 0.84—and a number of additional activities, providing a great learning experience for new and experienced users. For more information and instructions—how to put SoaS on your USB key or how to deploy it—please refer to our [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry|release notes]].
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The center piece was the announcement of Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry. May thanks due to Sebastian Dziallas and the Fedora packaging team as well as Sean Daly and the Sugar Labs marketing team (we got unprecedented international coverage). Simon Schampijer organized a Sugar Labs booth at LinuxTag (see his write-up below).
  
===Help Wanted===
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The bookends were the FOSSed and NECC meetings. Caroline Meeks and I ran a workshop for teachers at [http://www.fossed.com FOSSed] and along with Caryl Bigenho, Stephen Jacobs, and Mike Lee, we presented at [http://www.neccunplugged.com/ NECC unplugged].
  
3. Lionel Laske has asked for help with the French version of the Sugar FLOSS manual. He is happy to announce [http://olpc-france.org/docs/OLPC%20Guide%20de%20l'ordinateur.pdf the results of their efforts].
+
Caroline and I also made several trips to the Gardner and Lilla G. Frederick schools, where we are conducting Sugar on a Stick pilot programs this summer. We are running planning sessions with the teachers and start working with the students next week. Both schools have structured programs in the morning and open-ended discovery in the afternoon. It is in these afternoon sessions that we'll be using Sugar, as a compliment to the morning activities.
  
4. There is a new page in the wiki, [[What_could_I_do_in_an_hour%3F|What could I do in an hour?]], for collecting ideas for quick contributions. Please add your ideas.
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2. Two high-school students from Rwanda are interning with me this summer. Eric and Peter will be adding some debugging features to Turtle Art and following up with some classroom experiments when they return to Rwanda in August. We'll take some inspiration from some observations Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I made while debugging Turtle Art project remotely. It was clear that it wasn't clear to the programmer where in the code one was executing at the time of an error. Eric and Peter's goal is to highlight the brick being executed as one steps through the program. Raúl, for his part, has taken on the challenge of adding hover-activated tool tips.
  
===In the community===
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3. Alan Kay, Tony Forster, Ed Cherlin et al. have been in a discussion ([http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006853.html 1], [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006831.html 2]) about teaching physics that highlights the difference between diagnostic aids and physical thinking. Worth a read. K. K. Subramaniam (Subbu) pointed to [http://solar.physics.montana.edu/tslater/montillation_of_traxoline.html a parody], "The Montillation of Traxoline" that really spoke to me about the problem of "the 'intermediation' that has crept into the science education in recent decades. It is no longer about direct experience. It is about dealing with text in books, pictures on charts and movies on screen. It is about literacy, not comprehension."
  
5. Coming up this week: Sugar at [http://linuxtag.org Linuxtag] (24–27 June in Berlin). The marketing team has made a great [http://www.flickr.com/photos/39656470@N02/3650748717/ banner] to draw attention to our booth.
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4. Meanwhile, in the spirit of Sugar, we now have [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Modifying_Activities#Modifying_Physics a page in the wiki] describing how modify the Physics Activity.  
  
6. Also, Sugar at [http://www.fossed.com/ FOSSED] in Bethel, Maine, 24–26 June. Caroline Meeks and I will be running a three-hour Sugar workshop for teachers.
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5. Simon made regular reports from LinuxTag in [http://erikos.sweettimez.de/ his blog]. Kudos to Simon for all his work in organizing the booth and to Tony Anderson, David Van Assche, Sean Daly, Sebastian Dziallas, Bert and Eva Freudenberg and the Squeak Team, Adam Holt, and James Zaki. Also thanks to our booth partners, Skolelinux, X2GO, and Linux4Afrika.
  
7. And Sugar at [http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/ NECC] in Washington DC, 28 June–1 July. Mike Lee, Jeff Elkner and others from the Washington DC area will be representing Sugar Labs.
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===Help Wanted===
  
8. [http://squeakfest.org Squeakfest] will be held in Los Angeles 10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho.
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6. Maria del Pilar Saenz has put out a [Http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Convocatoria call for participation] in the various Sugar Labs Colombia programs. "If you are a teacher, engineer, student, free software enthusiast or related, you can collaborate. No matter the experience you have, what Most importantly, the dedication that can be given to projects."
  
9. There is an [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006272.html on-going discussion] about setting up a program similar to the [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors#Fedora_Ambassadors_Goals Fedora Ambassadors program] to help facilitate more community involvement in Sugar. Sugar "Facilitators" would:
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===In the community===
* Represent Sugar to the wider public
 
* Help spread the word about Sugar
 
* Be a point of contact for local community members and channel the feedback to the Sugar community
 
* Help recruit contributors
 
* Think of creative ways for promoting Sugar in your region
 
  
===Tech Talk===
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7. I'll be giving a keynote at [http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/ GUADEC]; my plan is to both introduce Sugar to the broader desktop community (with the goal of recruiting more contributors), to sing the praises of the desktop—the cloud is not the solution to all problem—but also articulate the need for more simplicity along the entire spectrum from developers to end users.
  
10. Tomeu Vizoso has been making great progress on [http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/05/progress-on-sugar-activities-with-swf.html improving support for Gnash/Flash based activities] within Sugar.
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8. [http://squeakfest.org Squeakfest] will be held in Los Angeles 10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho (starting today!).
  
11. David Van Assche started a [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006233.html thread on personalisation and collaboration]. The gist of the discussion is that we should be able to enhance many of the collaboration and evaluation scenarios by capturing and sharing information about user preferences and activities. Please join the discussion as this could be an important topic for Sugar 0.86.
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9. There will be a Sugar track at the [http://www.freesoftwareweek.org/ Free Software Week] in Bolzano, Italy, the week of 9 November 2009. We will likely start the Sugar Hackfest the weekend before in order to accommodate the restricted schedules of some of our community members, e.g., students. Free Software Week (and [http://www.sfscon.it/2009/ South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2009]) is sponsored by [http://www.tis.bz.it/ TIS innovation park].
  
12. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Nexcopy had donated a USB replicator to Sugar Labs. Caroline and I have successfully used the replcator to make Sugar on a Stick keys—we'll be bringing the system with us to FOSSED this week. We plan to use it at the Gardner Elementary School this summer as well.
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===Tech Talk===
 
 
13. Eric Bachard reports on http://planet.go-oo.org/ that starting in July there will be a new collaboration between OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris. Thomas Fontenay and Abdelkader Bellabes will work on a forked version of OpenOffice.org, named OOo4Kids, for performance improvement on low-power machines, like XO or gdium.
 
  
14. Manusheel Gupta reports the release of SocialCalc 0.8.3g for the Sugar environment. Please try [http://seeta.in/wiki/index.php?title=SocialCalc_on_Sugar#Downloads SocialCalc.xo] and share your feedback. Many thanks to Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, K.S. Preeti, Nicholas Doiron, Claudia Urrea, and Vijit Singh.
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10. Fred Grose continues to keep watch over our [http://wiki.suagrlabs.org wiki]. It remains a navicable site despite our growth in content and diversity over the past year.
  
Note to developers: K.S. Preeti has compiled [http://seeta.in/wiki/index.php?title=Guide a manual for programmers] for SocialCalc.
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11. Thomas C Gilliard has added a [http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/216653 Sugar VM] to the Virtual Appliance Marketplace.  
  
15. Last week, I mentioned that I had modified Mitchel Charity's [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4192 Ruler activity] to look up the screen resolution so that it would render properly on non-OLPC-XO displays. I had been parsing xdpyinfo to get the display resolution. Tomeu recommended that I use gtk.gdk.screen_width_mm() instead. Alas, it turns out that neither method is returning the proper screen resolution (either from within Sugar or otherwise) on any of the machines I have been using. Back to square one.
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12. Aleksey Lim announced V3 of the [http://activities.sugarlabs.org Sugar Activities Library]. Aleksey merged and adapted the AMO upstream code (the Mozilla Addon codebase).  
  
 
===Sugar Labs===
 
===Sugar Labs===
  
16. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-June-13-19-som.jpg|SOM]]).
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13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-June-20-26-som.jpg|SOM]]).  
  
 
=== Community News archive ===
 
=== Community News archive ===

Revision as of 11:19, 1 July 2009

english | español HowTo [ID# 31534] 

What's new

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

1. It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.

The center piece was the announcement of Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry. May thanks due to Sebastian Dziallas and the Fedora packaging team as well as Sean Daly and the Sugar Labs marketing team (we got unprecedented international coverage). Simon Schampijer organized a Sugar Labs booth at LinuxTag (see his write-up below).

The bookends were the FOSSed and NECC meetings. Caroline Meeks and I ran a workshop for teachers at FOSSed and along with Caryl Bigenho, Stephen Jacobs, and Mike Lee, we presented at NECC unplugged.

Caroline and I also made several trips to the Gardner and Lilla G. Frederick schools, where we are conducting Sugar on a Stick pilot programs this summer. We are running planning sessions with the teachers and start working with the students next week. Both schools have structured programs in the morning and open-ended discovery in the afternoon. It is in these afternoon sessions that we'll be using Sugar, as a compliment to the morning activities.

2. Two high-school students from Rwanda are interning with me this summer. Eric and Peter will be adding some debugging features to Turtle Art and following up with some classroom experiments when they return to Rwanda in August. We'll take some inspiration from some observations Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I made while debugging Turtle Art project remotely. It was clear that it wasn't clear to the programmer where in the code one was executing at the time of an error. Eric and Peter's goal is to highlight the brick being executed as one steps through the program. Raúl, for his part, has taken on the challenge of adding hover-activated tool tips.

3. Alan Kay, Tony Forster, Ed Cherlin et al. have been in a discussion (1, 2) about teaching physics that highlights the difference between diagnostic aids and physical thinking. Worth a read. K. K. Subramaniam (Subbu) pointed to a parody, "The Montillation of Traxoline" that really spoke to me about the problem of "the 'intermediation' that has crept into the science education in recent decades. It is no longer about direct experience. It is about dealing with text in books, pictures on charts and movies on screen. It is about literacy, not comprehension."

4. Meanwhile, in the spirit of Sugar, we now have a page in the wiki describing how modify the Physics Activity.

5. Simon made regular reports from LinuxTag in his blog. Kudos to Simon for all his work in organizing the booth and to Tony Anderson, David Van Assche, Sean Daly, Sebastian Dziallas, Bert and Eva Freudenberg and the Squeak Team, Adam Holt, and James Zaki. Also thanks to our booth partners, Skolelinux, X2GO, and Linux4Afrika.

Help Wanted

6. Maria del Pilar Saenz has put out a call for participation in the various Sugar Labs Colombia programs. "If you are a teacher, engineer, student, free software enthusiast or related, you can collaborate. No matter the experience you have, what Most importantly, the dedication that can be given to projects."

In the community

7. I'll be giving a keynote at GUADEC; my plan is to both introduce Sugar to the broader desktop community (with the goal of recruiting more contributors), to sing the praises of the desktop—the cloud is not the solution to all problem—but also articulate the need for more simplicity along the entire spectrum from developers to end users.

8. Squeakfest will be held in Los Angeles 10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho (starting today!).

9. There will be a Sugar track at the Free Software Week in Bolzano, Italy, the week of 9 November 2009. We will likely start the Sugar Hackfest the weekend before in order to accommodate the restricted schedules of some of our community members, e.g., students. Free Software Week (and South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2009) is sponsored by TIS innovation park.

Tech Talk

10. Fred Grose continues to keep watch over our wiki. It remains a navicable site despite our growth in content and diversity over the past year.

11. Thomas C Gilliard has added a Sugar VM to the Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

12. Aleksey Lim announced V3 of the Sugar Activities Library. Aleksey merged and adapted the AMO upstream code (the Mozilla Addon codebase).

Sugar Labs

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

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

27 Jun 2009 DeutschlandfunkSüßes für die Kleinen: Sugar ist Linux speziell für Kinder (in Deutsch)
26 Jun 2009 EduTechSugar on a stick, and other delectables (praise for the lowly USB drive)
26 Jun 2009 Ars TechnicaSugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms
24 Jun 2009 BBCOLPC software to power aging PCs
24 Jun 2009 Technology Review$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
15 Jun 2009 TechSavvyKidsEpisode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
10 Jun 2009 LWN.netSugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
27 May 2009 LWN.netActivities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
27 May 2009 Business WireDailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
29 Apr 2009 El MercurioAsí se vivió la fiesta del software libre
27 Apr 2009 ostaticSugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
25 Apr 2009 Free Software MagazineThe Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
24 Apr 2009 Ars TechnicaFirst taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
22 Apr 2009 BetanewsBeta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
27 Mar 2009 Mass High TechGoogle promotes summer open-source internships
18 Mar 2009 MetropolisA Good Argument
16 Mar 2009 Laptop MagazineSugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market WatchSugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DCLearning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomySugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

See our Press Page