Changes

== Sugar Digest ==

== Sugar Digest ==

"Dr. Ambedkar believed that ... to escape from oppression, they had to ... ‘educate, agitate and organize’ their way to emancipation." --Ramachandra Guha

"When I want to read a novel, I write one." -- Benjamin Disreali

1. Just for fun, taking inspiration from a conversation with Manuel Quiñones, I added a new sample program to Turtle Art. The [https://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/mainline/blobs/raw/master/samples/sensors-record.tb sensor-record.tb project] lets the user draw a picture with the mouse (or touch) and generates on the fly a Turtle Art project that will reproduce the drawing. Silly, but fun nonetheless. It comes bundled with the Version 185 of Turtle Blocks. (I still have the goal to recreate all of Sugar in Turtle Art.)

“An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows.” -- Frank Lloyd Wright

2. I also finally got around to writing a variant of [[Activities/Turtle_Confusion|Turtle Confusion ]] based on flags. [[Activities/TurtleFlags|Turtle Flags]] uses a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign-state_flags database of national flags] from the Wikipedia to present programming challenges. The first flag is Peru, which is red and white stripes. But things get more challenging from there.

1. Flavio Danesse made a post on the [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2013-August/012118.html Sur list] about his approach to teaching Python programming to children of age 12. He eschews the use of IDEs and other affordances in favor of giving them a basic understanding of simple, readily available tools.

3. [http://www.spiritualityforkids.com/ Spirituality for Kids] is a website that attempts to help children "understand the benefits of human dignity, tolerance, connecting to self, community, and the world, they are better equipped to become conscious leaders in their homes, schools and communities." I've worked with them to convert some of their material into a series of Sugar activities (See [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4679]). Two caveats: (1) the activities contain some rather large OGV videos, so be prepared for long download times and make sure you have plenty of available disk space. (I had broken the original activity up into 6 parts to address this, but may have to break it up even further.); and (2) the content is English only at the moment. I am working with them on packaging their Spanish-language videos.

:Yo me hice 5 repartidos básicos en pdf que conforman los tres talleres base de python joven, donde se les enseña a usar la terminal, a escribir código en un archivo, a ejecutarlo, luego se enseñan los tipos de datos, los operadores de todo tipo, control de flujo, conversiones de tipo, colecciones, funciones, clases, y poca cosa más.

4. Aura Mora announced three new Sugar activities from the ANSPE project in Colombia (National Agency for Overcoming Extreme Poverty):

:A eso hay que agregar que también hay que enseñarles donde pueden consultar el api, como buscar ayuda en internet, etc . . .

* [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4672 Super Chef]: This game raises the challenge to service many patrons in the shortest possible time. The Chef should suggest and prepare delicious and nutritious recipes at different times of day: breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner. So, while the child attends to customers, proper practice habits and learn food preparation varied and nutritious recipes for each meal.

Flavio goes on to say that when they are beginning to understand these things, he starts them on small exercises and only then the GTK API. Some of the students go on to use IDEs, but only after they have a strong foundation.

* [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4676 Cuidarme]: This is a skill game where the player must resolve a conflict destroy a ghost.

There is evidence that his approach has merit: many of the young programmers from Uruguay who have contributed so much to Sugar are current and former students of Flavio.

* [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4677 Participation]: The challenge of this game is to match sporting, cultural and recreational activities and institutions that are offered in your area.

2. We continue to make great progress in our efforts to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment in Sugar. An indication of progress is that community members not directly affiliated with the development effort are beginning to write [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4697 Sugar Apps] using the new API. More details can be found at [http://developer.sugarlabs.org/ here].

5. Ignacio Rodriguez (with some help from his friends) created a [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4683 new activity] to let Sugar users change the XO avatar in the user interface. In the spirit of encouraging our users to make Sugar into an expression of their own learning.

3. Gonzalo Odiard and I have been doing some work on classroom management in support of the OLPC AU deployment. The basic idea is to make it easier for the exchange of a variety of data within a classroom setting: the Journal Share activity enables bi-directional sharing of Journal objects, facilitating the distribution of materials and resources, as well as handing in homework assignments; the Share Favorites activity enables a group of students to share their Sugar desktop favorites settings, so that when embarking on a group or class project, everyone has access to the same set of tools; the Share Stats activity enable students to share activity-usage statistics with the classroom teacher, part of a general effort to make learning visible to both students and teachers.

 

 

4. I've been working with [http://www.spiritualityforkids.com Spirituality for Kids] to make their videos and lessons available as Sugar activities. We published [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4679 English-language activities] one month ago and [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4698 Spanish-language activities] this week.

 

5. "Dog bites man": I've made some changes to Turtle Blocks. In response to a request from a teacher in the OLPC Charlotte deployment, I changed the way in which the coordinate rescaling works. (Chances are you didn't even know Turtle Blocks lets you transform the coordinate scale. It is done with a button on the View toolbar.) By default, the turtle coordinates are scaled to pixels: if the turtle moves forward 100, it moves 100 pixels. But traditionally, Logo is scaled from 0 to 100; in that mode, forward 100 would move the turtle from the center of the screen (0, 0) to the top of the screen (0, 100). But for young children just being to learn numeracy, they typically use only one- and two-digit numbers. So I changed the scale from 0 to 20. In this new scaling, moving forward by single digits results in a readily visible change on the screen. I now save the coordinate scaling in gconf so that the user need only set it the first time they use Turtle Blocks (or it can be set as part of a deployment's configuration.) See [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addons/versions/4027#version-187 Turtle Blocks v187].

 

Speaking of Turtle Blocks, Google Summer of Code intern Marion Zepf continues to make great progress on the [[Summer_of_Code/2013/Turtle_Blocks_Python_export_project|export-to-Python extension]]. As a result of her work, Turtle Blocks projects can be exported as Python code. Our hope is that this will facilitate some of our users in making the transition from block-based programming languages to text-based programming languages, which are better suited for more complex tasks. (For example, the most complex Turtle Blocks program I have ever written uses about 1000 blocks. But Turtle Blocks itself is more than 25,000 lines of code. This suggests there is a gulf between the complexity we can reach in a block-based environment and a text-based environment.)

=== In the community ===

=== In the community ===

6. It is official: International Turtle Art Day will be on October 12. Pacita Peña and Cecilia Alcala will be hosting an event in Caacupé and there will be other events around the world sharing ideas and resources. More details soon.

6. International Turtle Art Day will be on October 12. Pacita Peña and Cecilia Alcala will be hosting an event in Caacupé and there will be other events around the world sharing ideas and resources. Brian Silverman and Artemis Papert will be featured guests. There are guides to holding a Turtle Art Day event available in [http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Ingles_10-08-2013.pdf English] and [http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Esp_12-08-2013.pdf Spanish]. (Tip of the hat to Claudia Urea, who has led this effort.)

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

7. I've been working in enhancing the intra-Sugar statistics gathering mechanism in order to "make learning visible" to the child and classroom teacher. We landed a patch to Sugar a while ago to record activity launch times (previously, just the most recent launch time was recorded). With these new data, it is possible to not just make visible which activities have been used, but also, how often each instance of an activity has been used. I've modified the [[Activities/Analyze_Journal|Analyze Journal activity]] to reflect these changes and Gonzalo Odiard and I are working on a [[Features/Classroom_management|classroom management system]] to facilitate sharing of these data between the learner and the classroom teacher. This is very early in the effort: comments and feedback most welcome.

7. Daniel Narvaez announced that we have entered the final phase of the run up to the Sugar 1.0 release. Please help us with testing. There is a short [http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/query status=new&status=assigned&status=accepted&status=reopened&priority=Immediate&priority=Urgent&component=Sugar&status_field=New&order=priority list of bugs] we are hoping to quash in time for the final release at the end of September.

 

8. Daniel Drake got married this week in Nicaragua! Congratulations and best wishes for a joyful union. The festivities did not deter Daniel from announcing the release of OLPC OS 13.2.0 for XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 and XO-4. Details of new features, known issues, and how to download/install/upgrade can all be found in the [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.0 release notes]. Many thanks Daniel, who lead the release process and to all contributors, testers, up-streams, and those who have provided feedback of any kind. This is by far the best OLPC/Sugar release yet! (Also, there is a really nice article about what else Daniel has been doing in Nicaragua [http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2013/07/24/reportajes-especiales/155871-isla-maestros?movil here].)

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Please visit (and contribute to) our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet].

7. Please visit (and contribute to) [http://planet.sugarlab.org our planet].

== Community News archive ==

== Community News archive ==