Archives/Current Events/2017-11-07

1. I just completed our application for Sugar Labs participation in Google Code-in (GCI) 2017. As most of you know, GCI is a programming contest for youth ages 13-17 hosted by Google. Sugar Labs has participated the past 5 years. It is a great opportunity to work with young programmers, many of whom continue to contribute to Sugar Labs long after the contest ends (in fact, my co-administrator this year, Ignacio Rodriguez, is a former GCI participant.) We should know by the end of the month if we are accepted into the program this year.

If we accepted, we will need to accumulate tasks for the contest, which can include bug fixes, activity and feature development, design, outreach, documentation, and research. Please contact either Ignacio or me if you have interest in being a GCI mentor or if you have ideas for GCI tasks. See Google_Code_In_2017 for more details.

2. James Cameron has announced the release of Sugar 0.112. This new stable release of Sugar is largely a maintenance release; it includes some bug fixes and new translations. Please see the release notes regarding the details. Thanks to James as well as Besnik Bleta, Chris Leonard, Eduard Sanou, Ezequiel Pereira, Gonzalo Odiard, György Balló, Hrishi Patel, Ignacio Rodríguez, Manash Raja, Sam Parkinson, Sanchit Kapoor, and Utkarsh Tiwari.

3. In anticipation of Sugar 0.112, I managed to get wrappers around Turtle Blocks JS [1] and Music Blocks [2] so that they can be run inside Sugar itself.

4. Jatin Dhankhar and Sam Cantero are making headway on ASLOv3 [3], [4], a new version of the Sugar Labs activity portal, which promises to be easier to use and maintain. Hopefully we'll have the new server running before GCI begins.

5. There are still a few more days left to vote in the Sugar Labs oversight board election. If you did not receive your ballot, please contact the members and election committee, e.g., Samson Goddy.