Changes

At the core of Constructionism is “learning through doing.” If you want more learning, you want more doing. At Sugar Labs we provide tools to promote doing. (We focus almost exclusively on tools, not instructional materials.) However, we go beyond “doing” by incorporating critical dialog and reflection into the Sugar learning environment, through mechanisms for collaboration, journaling, and portfolio.

At the core of Constructionism is “learning through doing.” If you want more learning, you want more doing. At Sugar Labs we provide tools to promote doing. (We focus almost exclusively on tools, not instructional materials.) However, we go beyond “doing” by incorporating critical dialog and reflection into the Sugar learning environment, through mechanisms for collaboration, journaling, and portfolio.

Sugar Labs is a spinoff of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project and consequently it has inherited many of its goals from that project. The goal of OLPC is to bring the ideas of Constructionism to scale in order to reach more children. A particular focus is on children in the developing world. In order to meet that goal, Sugar, which was originally developed for OLPC, was by necessity a small-footprint solution that required few resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, or network connectivity. The major change on focus from the OLPC project is that Sugar Labs strives to make the Sugar desktop available to multiple platforms, not just the OLPC XO hardware.

Sugar Labs is a spinoff of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project and consequently it has inherited many of its goals from that project. The goal of OLPC is to bring the ideas of Constructionism to scale in order to reach more children. A particular focus is on children in the developing world. In order to meet that goal, Sugar, which was originally developed for OLPC, was by necessity a small-footprint solution that required few resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, or network connectivity. The major change on focus from the OLPC project is that Sugar Labs strives to make the Sugar desktop available to multiple platforms, not just the OLPC hardware.

===Who develops Sugar?===

===Who develops Sugar?===

===Who uses Sugar?===

===Who uses Sugar?===

Ultimately, our goal is to reach learners (and educators) with powerful tools and engage them in Constructionist learning. Currently we reach them in many ways: the majority of our users get the Sugar desktop preinstalled on OLPC XO hardware. We have a more modest set of users who get Sugar packaged in Fedora, Trisquel, Debian, Ubuntu, or other GNU/Linux platforms. Some users get Sugar on Live Media (i.e., Sugar on a Stick). Recently Sugarizer, a repackaging of some of the core Sugar ideas for the browser, has been finding its way to some users. There are also a number of Sugar activities that are popular outside of the context Sugar itself, for example, Turtle Blocks, which has wide-spread use in India. Harder to measure is the extent to which Sugar has influenced other providers of “educational” software. If the Sugar pedagogy is incorporated by others, that advances our goal.

Ultimately, our goal is to reach learners (and educators) with powerful tools and engage them in Constructionist learning. Currently we reach them in many ways: the majority of our users get the Sugar desktop preinstalled on OLPC hardware. We have a more modest set of users who get Sugar packaged in Fedora, Trisquel, Debian, Ubuntu, or other GNU/Linux platforms. Some users get Sugar on Live Media (i.e., Sugar on a Stick). Recently Sugarizer, a repackaging of some of the core Sugar ideas for the browser, has been finding its way to some users. There are also a number of Sugar activities that are popular outside of the context Sugar itself, for example, Turtle Blocks, which has wide-spread use in India. Harder to measure is the extent to which Sugar has influenced other providers of “educational” software. If the Sugar pedagogy is incorporated by others, that advances our goal.

===Who supports Sugar?===

===Who supports Sugar?===

We have several near-term opportunities that we should leverage:

We have several near-term opportunities that we should leverage:

* Raspian: The Raspberry PI 3.0 is more than adequate to run Sugar—the experience rivals or exceeds that of the OLPC XO 4.0 hardware. While RPi is not the only platform we should be targeting, it does has broad penetration into the Maker community, which shares a synergy with our emphasis on “doing”. It is low-hanging fruit. With a little polish we could have an image available for download from the RPi website.

* Raspian: The Raspberry Pi 3 is more than adequate to run Sugar—the experience rivals or exceeds that of the OLPC XO-4 hardware, though not the OLPC NL3 hardware. While Raspberry Pi is not the only platform we should be targeting, it does has broad penetration into the Maker community, which shares a synergy with our emphasis on “doing”. It is low-hanging fruit. With a little polish we could have an image available for download from the Raspberry Pi website.

* Trisquel: We have the potential for better leveraging the Free Software Foundation as a vehicle for promoting Sugar. Their distro of choice is Trisquel and the maintainer does a great job of keep the Sugar packages up to date.

* Trisquel: We have the potential for better leveraging the Free Software Foundation as a vehicle for promoting Sugar. Their distro of choice is Trisquel and the maintainer does a great job of keep the Sugar packages up to date.

* Sugarizer: The advantage of Sugarizer is that it has the potential of reaching orders of magnitude more users since it is web-based and runs in Android and iOS. There is some work to be done to make the experience palatable on small screens and the current development environment is—at least my opinion—not scalable or maintainable. The former is a formidable problem. The latter quite easy to address.

* Sugarizer: The advantage of Sugarizer is that it has the potential of reaching orders of magnitude more users since it is web-based and runs in Android and iOS. There is some work to be done to make the experience palatable on small screens and the current development environment is—at least my opinion—not scalable or maintainable. The former is a formidable problem. The latter quite easy to address.