Archive/Current Events/2010-10-02

Sugar Digest

1. One of the pleasures of working with Sugar is the interaction with educators. Over the past few weeks, I have been in a closed loop with Tony Forster, who has been developing some lesson plans and tutorial around the use of the Slide Rule activity that I had written. Not only has Tony given me feedback about bugs, he has also given me ideas about how to make the activity more useful and compelling to students. At Tony's urging, I have recently added new slides for Sin, Tangent, Log Log, and Natural Log. In the process, I did a major refactoring of the code – I am almost not embarrassed by it – and a retooling of the UI. But also, in the spirit of Sugar, I added the ability to generate custom slides and stators on the fly. (I've a bit more fine-tuning to do before I release the code, but http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/attachment/ticket/2310/Sliderule-15.xo is at least somewhat usable.)

Not to be outdone, Tony generated a slide rule in Gamemaker. A glutton for punishment, he then made a slide rule in TurtleArt (http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2010/09/turtle-sliderule.html).

The only thing better than Sugar is the Sugar community.

2. Reminder: we will be holding our mid-term election in October in order to fill three oversight board positions. If you are not an "official" member of Sugar Labs and would like to be, please contact members AT sugarlabs DOT org. Being a member of the oversight board is a great way to be involved with the project. It is not to late to add your name to the ballot.

In the community

3. Jim Simmon's Make Your Own Sugar Activities! manual is now available en español [1].

4. There will be an OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit October 21 – 24 in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [2].

Tech Talk

5. Aleksey Lim has set up an IRC channel for "newbie" developers: #sugar-newbies on freenode. The channel is logged so that we can archive "newbie" questions and answers ([3]).