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Line 5: − + − + − and 25 teacher trainers and curricula development specialists on Tuesday and Wednesday. The theme was ostensibly robotics: Peru is distributing robotics kits to all of the schools. We walked through lots of different approaches to using Sugar to interact with the physical world, through sensors and software (Turtle Art, Scratch, Etoys, Measure). We had them build sensors, calibrate them, and then program some activity with them. They made great progress and had lots of fun. Sugar enthusiasm abounds! − They are in the process of migrating to 10.1.3 as well as distributing machines to high-school students running Fedora with Open Office installed. (These machines will also include Scratch and the GNOME version of Turtle Art, which has undergone a great deal of refactoring.)+ − + − + − <gallery>+ − File:Sugarinbrowser1.png+ − </gallery>+ + + + + + + + + + + − 5. Raul Gutierrez Segales (now working at Collabora) and I have been working on extending Sugar-collaboration to GNOME, using Turtle Art as the test case. It is quite exciting to be able to work transparently between the GNOME desktop and a Sugar instance. We'll be pushing out an RPM and a new version of the .xo file in a few days.+ − We've been doing a lot of refactoring of the code with some unexpected results: since you can share bitmaps and since you can now use the camera as a sensor, you can write a video broadcast system in Turtle Art – it takes all of three blocks (well, 7 blocks if you want it to work well). Meanwhile, Tony Forster and Guzman Trinidad have been cranking out great science and engineering projects using sensors and sounds.+ + − Part of the refactoring effort has been to make it easier to plug new devices into Turtle Art. At present, there are plugins for the camera, audio sensors, and RFID tag readers. There are plugin projects to support Arduino, Lego WeDo, Lego NXT, and the GoGo board.+ + + + + − 6. Belated thanks to Laura, Alex, Parul, and Julie, the MIT marketing team that did an analysis of Sugar Labs. Their final presentation can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/marketlabsugar/+
→Sugar Digest
===Sugar Digest===
===Sugar Digest===
1. Hats off to Simon Schampijer and Sascha Silbe who have released Sugar 0.92. While primarily a maintenance release, there are some new feature of note; for example, better handling of Sugar Journal objects when copied to/from removable media. Release notes coming soon.
1. The Chipote/Sugarlabs cycling team [http://www.velonation.com/News/ID/7743/Rathe-grabs-Rutas-de-America-stage-win-for-Chipotle-Development-Team.aspx won a stage] in the Rutas Américas race in Uruguay this past week. By the big race, the Tour of Uruguay (Vuelta a Uruguay) is not until next month. We have been accumulating some great ideas for learning activities for the children of Uruguay to engage in leading up to and during the race (See [[Vuelta a Uruguay]]). We are lacking someone to coordinate these efforts in Uruguay: package up the ideas; get the word out to the teachers and children, etc. Please let me know if you are interested in helping.
2. Last week, I was in Lima, where Claudia Urrea, Kiko Majorga, Sdenka Salas and I ran some workshops for teachers and teacher trainers: 1000 teachers on Monday
2. Speaking of Uruguay, it seems that there is consensus to hold a Sugar Camp in Montevideo in conjunction with Ceibal Jam's [[Uruguay_Summit_2011|EduJam]] in May 5–7. The plan is to add two days (Sunday/Monday, May 8, 9) of coding just after the main conference. Details to follow. In the week prior to the Camp, there will be a [[Conozco_Uruguay_Tour|"Conozco Uruguay" Community Exploration Tour]] for those interested in seeing Sugar in action in the schools of Uruguay.
We do need to discuss some of the details of the Camp. Please add you ideas to the [[Sugar_Camp_Q2_2011|wiki page]].
3. Other activities: I connected Sebastian Silva and Somos Azucar up with a group at the US Dept. of State who is interest in English-language learning. They are going to develop tools for a pilot in Colombia. When he returns from paternity leave, he can give us an update. Also, I have been contacted by three commercial companies who are interested in working with Sugar: UK company that makes class-participation tools has ported their system to Sugar and is looking for help with pilots (they may do a pilot in Peru); a Korean company is interested in porting some Sugar apps to Android – interesting in light of the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-February/012564.html ongoing discussion] on IAEP list; and a Canadian company that has been making constructionist-like learning tools for more than 30 years. Also, OLPC France is working on a new activity to let children build stories; this is a request from a foundation in France who wants to deploy this activity in several schools by the end of April.
3. There will also be a [http://squeakland.org/ Squeakfest] in Montevideo at the end of May (26–28 at Universidad Católica del Uruguay).
4. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) has a preliminary version of Sugar running in the “Cloud”. He is using VNC to push the output of Sugar running in a VM to a browser. It works remarkably well and may well be the easiest way to demo Sugar to potential users.
4. Rather than writing my column for the Sugar Digest, once again I have gotten sucked down a coding rat hole :). My two terrible addictions seem to be coffee and Python. Since I last posted, I have been doing more work on the Turtle Art plugin mechanism. I have two community efforts underway to use plugins: Ian Daniher wrote a plugin for WeDo and Emiliano Pastorino has written a plugin for NXT. (An Arduino plugin is also in the works.) I got lots of great feedback from both of them (as well as Raul and Tony) and made some adjustments that will be part of Release 107.
Also, as part of Release 107 is better handling of shared turtles when using Turtle Art collaboratively. With the help of Simon, Gonzalo, and Tony, I managed to sort out a number of little problems that added up to a lot of confusion: for example, you can no longer drag a turtle that someone else is sharing with you. This fixes a problem with synchronization of shared turtles (#2687). Also, the problem with extra turtles appearing when you open a project under a new 'nickname' has been fixed (#2441).
5. I also wrote a new game: [[Activities/Paths|Paths]]. It is based upon a game I played with Oscar Becerra in Lima a few weeks ago. The basic idea is to create closed paths using tiles on an 8×8 grid. A collaborative version will be available soon. Meanwhile, [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4409 download] it and play against the robot.
6. I have also been working on a 'learn to read' activity with a Canadian educational foundation. Details available soon.
===Help wanted===
7. As mentioned above, we need help on the ground in Uruguay for [[Vuelta a Uruguay]].
===Tech Talk===
8. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has done some experimenting with Sugar running with GNOME 3 (See [[Community/Distributions/Fedora#Fedora_15_gnome3_with_sugar_0.92.0|F15/Gnome3/Sugar0.92]] for details).
===Sugar Labs===
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.
<gallery>
File:2011-Mar-5-11-som.jpg|2011 Mar 5th-11th (21 emails)
File:2011-Feb-26-Mar-4-som.jpg|2011 Feb 26th-Mar 4th (55 emails)
File:2011-Feb-19-25-som.jpg|2011 Feb 19th-25th (63 emails)
</gallery>
Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
===Help wanted===
===Help wanted===