Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

=== Sugar Digest ===  

=== Sugar Digest ===  

1. While [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008746.html the decision panel debates] whether or not Sugar Labs should be a GNU/Linux distributor, I thought it would be worthwhile surveying the GNU/Linux distribution's plans regarding Sugar Release 0.84.

1. I am behind in my blogging, but not because I haven't been writing. I had a deadline for a National Science Foundation grant last week. Diego Uribe and I submitted a grant entitled: "Developing creativity skills through the Sugar learning platform: Empowering next generation Scientists and Engineers." The gist of what we are proposing is to embed deliberate creative-thinking dynamics into Sugar. We expect that children engaged and collaborating in open-ended learning activities will deliberately exercise and develop their creative thinking skills.

* Alexsey Lim has been using jhconvert to maintain "official" repositories for a number of distributions, e.g., 0.86 was packaged for Mandriva's development repository and will be in the next release, 2010.0, scheduled for 2009-11-03. Alexsey has compiled [[Development_Team/Packaging|a table of the various packaging efforts]].

2. I've also been writing code. I chased down a number of bugs in Turtle Art in anticipation of the 0.86 Release. One particularly nasty bug involved an Overflow Error. Kids seem to love typing in big numbers into the number blocks. When they do, they were causing integer overflow errors, which was causing Turtle Art to freeze. I added a work-around in Version 73—hopefully things will be a bit more robust. I also got some help from Bernie Innocenti and Simon Schampijer in resolving a problem that had been nagging at me since last spring. I want to be able to launch Turtle Art from outside of Sugar. Sounds easy enough, but I always had trouble with the way in which the top-level window was interacting with the window manager in my Gnome desktop. The fix turned out to be to use the maximize method instead of the request-size method. Now I am able o use the standard GTK menu toolbar in replacement of the Sugar toolbar when running stand-alone.t With the exception of Journal access and collaboration, everything else seems to just work. (I did enable opening and saving projects to the filesystem, but I haven't yet enable access to rich media using the Show block from outside of Sugar.) Simon also helped me to clean up the artwork for German and French. Carlo Falciola has been helping me with Italian and Raul Gutierrez Segales has been helping me with Spanish.

* David Van Assche has been relying on jhconvert for openSUSE rpms as well.

* Peter Robinson reports that 0.86 is already in rawhide and hence will be in the soon to be released Fedora 12 beta.

* Jonas Smedegaard reports that the plan for Debian is to maintain: (a) the newest upstream branch (currently 0.86); (b) newest stable branch (currently 0.84; soon to be 0.86); and possibly (c) additional older stable releases. "In other words, the plan is to track at least head of development and head of stable. And to leave a trail behind of all stable releases for others to spawn off from if they so choose."

* Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has 0.86 running on Trisquel (See [http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar Trisquel-Sugar]).  

All of these distributions come with the core (Fructose) activities; some, such as openSUSE, come with many additional (Honey) activities pre-packaged. Activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO, our Activity Library) can be used by all distributions to add 100s of additional activities. The updater in the Sugar Control Panel will automatically update the activities installed on your distribution to the latest versions.

3. And I have been writing some lectures. At the invitation of Donna Benjamin, I prepared a video for the [http://open-edge.info/ Open Edge 2009] meeting about the new features in Sugar 0.86. I also prepared a lecture about Sugar for the [http://qt.nokia.com/qtdevdays2009 QT Developer Days] meeting in Munich that I am giving tomorrow.

2. Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language version. She has kindly made it available for download (See [http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom The XO Laptop in the Classroom]).

4. On the way to Munich, I spent 24 hours in Berlin for a mini Sugar Camp which Simon graciously hosted at his flat. Sebastian Dzallias joined us as well. We ate cake, drank coffee, wrote code, and discusseed many of the pressing issues of the day, including sustainability, activity bundles, 0.88 planning; we also sketched out a plan for the Bolzano Sugar Camp.

3. Kludge of the week: I was recently asked for a copy of one of my talks. I give all of my talks using the presentation features of Turtle Art and I still haven't gotten around to writing the export function from Turtle Art to .odp (Open Office presentation). For this particular request, I didn't think that the HTML exported from Turtle Art was adequate. So I wrote a one-line Python call to save screen shots into the Journal, loaded it into the Turtle Art "programmable brick", and then added that brick to the "next slide" trigger. The result: a copy of each slide of my talk automatically saved to the Journal. You can see the results ([[File:Desktop-Summit.pdf]]) in the wiki.

5. Before crossing the pond, I made a trip to New York to visit Gerald Ardito at the Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School. It was a full day, between teaching six fifth-grade classes, meetings with the principal, vice principal, superintendent, and president of the school board. A highlight was when I was greeted by a room full of chidlren running the Sugar Speak program in a simultaenous chorus of "Welcome Mr. Bender." This was followed by an audio wave across the classroom. In a debriefing with the teachers at the end of the day, several interesting observations were made: (1) there was no generder bias in the level of engagement (we were programming in Turtle Art); and (2) multiple distinct strategies were used by the children, including systematic modification of example code, asking from—and receiving—help from a classmate, and an iterative process of exploration of the various program elements. All three approaches led to both the children and the teachers reaching a level of comfort and pleasure with programming in short order.

=== In the Community ===

=== Tech Talk ===

4. There is a nice write up of the recent Sugar Day in Argentina (See [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReunionSeptiembre2009 Reunion Septiembre 2009]).

6. Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has released an updated [http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso Sugar on Trisquel build] with Honey Activities installed. He also added a graphical usb-creator application.  

===Sugar Labs===  

===Sugar Labs===  

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-September-19-25-som.jpg|SOM]]).

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-October-3-9-som.jpg|SOM]]).  

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===