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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.  

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.

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 would 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.

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.