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Line 7: − + − 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 [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.+ + + − 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” by 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.+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + − 5. Olin Guru Camp, April 17+ + + − 6. “Healthy Kids Day”, Waltham MA YMCA, April 18+ − 7. [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar Camp]] May 16,17+ − ===Tech Talk===+ + − 8. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078 Labyrinth]+ − 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]]).+
→What's new
===Sugar Digest ===
===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.
1. Five Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2009. We are excited about all five proposals; our only regret is that we were unable to accept any more of the promising proposals we received. Thank you to everyone who participated in the selection process—the feedback on the proposals from the community has been especially of great value.
To all of those who were not selected this year, we appreciate your efforts and hope that you will be able to find time to participate in the Sugar Labs community in some fashion this summer. We hope you'll reapply next year.
To those of you who were selected this year, both mentors and mentees, let's converge on a regular weekly meeting time in IRC to exchange notes on progress and problems. Individual teams should, of course, make arrangements for regular meeting times as well. In general, let's continue to hang out on #sugar, so that the developer community can stay abreast of what is happening.
Kudos to Jamison Quinn for organizing our GSoC efforts and seeing to all of the details. Finally, thanks once again to Google for this opportunity.
Student: Lucian Branescu Mihaila
Project: Webified
Mentor: Walter Bender
Student: Sascha Silbe
Project: Version support for Sugar datastore and Journal
Mentor: Jameson Quinn
Student: Felipe Lopez Toledo
Project: Karma + Activities
Mentor: Bryan Berry
Student: Vamsi Krishna Davuluri
Project: Adding Print Support to the XOs
Mentor: Andres Ambrois
Student: Benjamin Schwartz
Project: Decentralized Asynchronous Collision-free Editing with Groupthink
Mentor: Assim Deodia
2. Caroline Meeks and I spent last Saturday at the Waltham YMCA where we exercised Sugar on a Stick with children and their parents visiting the Y for Healthy Kids Day. (I had to leave early to meet to attend to some sewer problems—don't ask.) All in all, it was a great day.
From the technical point of view, Sugar on a Stick lived up to its billing. We were able to get all but one of the mismatched castaway PCs to boot, even some of which woould not boot into Windows XP. (The one machine that did not boot would not power on at all—not something we could fix with software.) We did have one machine with an invisible cursor, but otherwise it ran fine. Sound worked on every machine that had speakers. We were able to assign static IP addresses and every machine was able to connect to the Internet. However something was preventing collaboration to work: we could see each other, but not share activities or interact with other users connected to jabber.sugarlabs.org. We have some debugging to do. Ideally, we would have brought a school server in to assign IP addresses, which would have assured that at least local collaboration worked.
Caroline will be writing up detailed notes on the children's use of Sugar throughout the day. The way things were organized, parents and children were dropping in to the room at any time during the day. We had in the room anywhere from two to six children, as young as two and as old as seven or eight, while I was there. They went right to the machines without any introduction to Sugar. Most of the machines were either already running an activity or had the Home View visible. Popular activities included Memorize, where some children went so far as to design their own games, Jigsaw Puzzle, Turtle Art, Speak, Write, and Mini Tam Tam.
While hardly a typical classroom setting, things went quite well with this somewhat haphazard introduction to Sugar: the children were engaged, as were their parents. However there was not time enough for them to discover or exploit features such as the Journal. And since collaboration was not working, all of the interactions were solo. Undoubtedly there is some more scaffolding we can provide children and parents new to Sugar. (We've already had some follow-up discussions on how to best integrate examples into activities and how to make the views and frame more readily discoverable on non-OLPC-XO hardware.)
===In the community===
===In the community===
3. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal. These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.
There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar meeting]]) where we will be discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.
===Tech Talk===
4. Christian Marc Schmidt led a discussion of potential 0.86 improvements to the UI in a Design Team meeting this past weekend. Together, we came up with a list of design goals to possibly include in our development schedule for 0.86, with concrete tasks to be accomplished in advance of SugarCamp. Christian added a meeting summary on the wiki, along with a link to the transcript: [[Design_Team/Meetings]]
5. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078 Labyrinth] Paola Bruccoleri, a teacher from Uruguay has already tried the new version and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps
with it (See http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Imagen:Labyrinth6-Tutorial.pdf). Aleksey also released a new version of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081 Record].
6. In response to a discussion on IRC this week, we will experiment with some mini Developer tutorials, with the goal of sharing techniques on activity development. I'll launch the series with a brief session on keyboard shortcuts this week on #sugar on irc.freenode.net following Thursday's weekly developer meeting.
===Sugar Labs ===
===Sugar Labs ===
6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-April-11-17-som.jpg|SOM]]).
=== Community News archive ===
=== Community News archive ===