Changes

===Sugar Digest ===

===Sugar Digest ===

1. We are getting very close: Caroline Meeks and I visited the computer lab at the Waltham Massachusetts YMCA to test the latest Sugar on a Stick images built by Sebastian Dziallas and the release team. The lab is a small room with 10 tower PCs of different models and manufacturers. We managed to get nine out of ten machines to boot. Three of the machines required a "helper CD", since they didn't have USB boot ability in the BIOS. The one machine that would not boot Sugar on a Stick wouldn't even power on, so arguably we had a 100% success rate!!

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.

There are still a few issues to work out: the helper CD, which is based on Fedora 9, only seems to work for SoaS-1 (the Fedora-10-based images). Sebastian, Sascha Silbe, and Simon Schampijer are investigating (and issued a new helper CD while I was writing this). A seemingly more intractable issue is the network. The lab has a wired network with static IP addresses assigned to each machine. I was able to get the network working but the process is tedious—I don't think we can expect teachers and young children to use ifconfig, route, etc. from the shell. I also had to boot each machine in Windows, get the IP address, netmask, gateway, and DNS, but this is something that needs only to be done once per machine. Configuring the network on Sugar on a Stick has to happen every time, presuming the children will be jumping from machine to machine. A control panel widget for setting up a static IP address is a first step, but I wonder if there is an easier way.

It was great to have the opportunity to spend three uninterrupted hours talking with Pablo and Caroline about ideas for further engiging 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 respsonsible for communication between groups with the goal that eventually individual teachers would become confident enough to engage directly.

Caroline and I will be back to the Y in a week (Healthy Kids Day) to test the set up with children and parents attending a day-long open house. This will be the first real test of Sugar on a Stick by children in a real-world setting.

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 unequivolcally a very successful debut. Many thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.

Many thanks to the release team, everyone who has been helping with the testing, and a tip of the hat to Sebastian, who has made an extraordinary effort.

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. I am more than a little behind in my weekly Sugar update. Between planes, trains, and automobiles I have not had the time or ability to concentrate on writing.  

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 [http://olpc.dailymotion.com/ OLPC channel]. A less bandwidth-intensive approach would be to revisit the "Sugar Cards" idea. The Squeak project has [http://www.etoysillinois.org/search.php?q=squeakcards "Squeak Cards"], a model we could readily emulate.

After leaving the Skolelinux meeting in Bergen, I went to Paris where I spent a couple of days meeting with Sean Daley, Patrick Sinz, and the crowd at Solutions Linux. Sean and I demoed Sugar on a Stick to a crowd gathering around the Open Office booth–Open Office has a team in France working on a version for children (and maybe for Sugar?). Other potential projects we discussed at Solutions Linux included extending the file sharing and privacy models within Sugar.

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.

From Paris I went to Bolzano, where I spent two days with another Patrick—Ohnewein—and Bernie Innocenti at the TIS Innovation Park. We met with Prof. Alessandro Efrem Colombi and some of his colleagues and students from the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano faculty of education. We had an animated discussion about how to advance the engagement of teachers in constructionist thinking as facilitated by Sugar. He and his students seem ready to engage from both a pedagogical and technological perspective.

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.)

Back in Boston, I met with Seth Weinberger. His foundation, [http://www.innovationsforlearning.org Innovations for Learning], makes the TeacherMate, a small hand-held device with embedded Gnash applications running in it. He and his team have developed some nice reading and math activities that could be readily ported to Sugar in the form of Gnash desktop activities, as per the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-April/013631.html discussion about bundles] being led by Wade Brainerd on the sugar-devel list.

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===

===In the community===

3. Looks like Sugar Labs be joining OLPC France at a "Sugar Camp" in Paris on the weekend of 16 May. Details forthcoming.

5. Olin Guru Camp, April 17

 

 

7. [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar Camp]] May 16,17

===Tech Talk===

===Tech Talk===

4. Luke Macken has added support in the Fedora [https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ liveusb-creator] for automatically downloading various Fedora releases, as well as Sugar on a Stick!

8. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of Labyrinth. It is available on activities.sugarlabs.org.

===Sugar Labs ===

===Sugar Labs ===

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-Mar-28-Apr-3-som.jpg|SOM]]).

9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-April-4-10-som.jpg|SOM]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===