Sugar Labs/Current Events

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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 another insanely busy week. The highlight for me was the FOSSVT meeting. Caroline Meeks and Pablo Flores drove up to Vermont with me (in Caroline's Prius), where we spent the day with more than 100 educators from the region.

It was great to have the opportunity to spend three uninterrupted hours talking with Pablo and Caroline about ideas for further engaging with teachers in Uruguay on the drive up—the key is capture and share the very local discussions among teachers and to draw them into to the broader discussion. We are considering designating regional amanuenses who'd be responsible for communication between groups with the goal that eventually individual teachers would become confident enough to engage directly.

At the meeting itself, Sugar on a Stick was the main event. As soon as we walked in the door, we attracted a crowd and soon the entire lobby of the inn was full of smiling teachers running Sugar on their laptops and netbooks. There was even an HP tablet PC running Sugar. I was very pleasantly surprised at how well Sugar ran with the touch screen. After lunch we gathered in a conference room where everyone had a laptop and SoaS USB key. I was up front, giving an overview of Sugar (using Turtle Art for my presentation, of course) while Caroline and Pablo walked the room, helping people get started. By the end of the hour, everyone was up and running—a roomful of happy Sugar users on a wide variety of platforms. There were a few network problems and the version of SoaS we were running didn't have the proper audio patches, but it was unequivocally a very successful debut. Many thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.

Pablo slept on the ride home; Caroline and I discussed strategies for getting to the next step: engaging teachers in regard to using Sugar for learning. (We have growing confidence that we can get Sugar into their hands, but we want to help ensure that they get a clear picture of the many ways that they can leverage it in their classrooms.

2. Caroline's call for short videos of Sugar Activities is one mechanism we should use to spread the word on creative uses of Sugar. Maybe we can set up a Sugar channel on [dailymotion.com Daily Motion] or take advantage of their OLPC channel. A less bandwidth-intensive approach would be to revisit the "Sugar Cards" idea. The Squeak project has "Squeak Cards", a model we could readily emulate.

3. Another topic we touched on was one I had been discussing with Pascal Chesnais last fall: why do we use IRC for our own work, while building Jabber-based tools for Sugar collaboration. It is great to have IRC on Sugar, but it would be a good exercise to “eat our own dogfood” but using more Jabber in our development process.

4. Saturday, Caroline and I will be at the Waltham YMCA, where we'll be exercising Sugar on a Stick with children and their parents. The computer room full of mismatched castaway PCs, some of which won't even boot into Windows XP. Running Sugar on a Stick really does breath new life into these machines: it boots quickly and seems quite lively in comparison to Windows (I had the painful experience of having to boot each of the machines into Windows in order to note the static IP address assigned to each machine, so I had a great opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison. There was no comparison.)

5. Jameson Quinn has been doing a great job leading our Google Summer of Code program. We have been allocated five slots, which is a great vote of confidence in Sugar Labs since most organizations new to the program only get one or two slots in their first year. We have been conducting interviews with the candidates and should have a final list early next week.

In the community

5. Olin Guru Camp, April 17

6. “Healthy Kids Day”, Waltham MA YMCA, April 18

7. Paris Sugar Camp May 16,17

Tech Talk

8. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of Labyrinth

Sugar Labs

9. 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 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