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== Sugar Digest 2016-05-25 ==

== Sugar Digest ==

1. Just a quick Marvin Minsky remembrance: Marvin, especially in the days of overhead projectors, would use a bit of theatrics in his talks. He'd walk up to the overhead projector, "accidentally" drop all of his slides on the floor, and then proceed to talk about whatever happened to be on his mind at the moment. Often, part way through his allotted time, he'd bend over, scan the slides, pick one up and say, "this looks interesting", and talk about the theme of the slide. Try doing that with PowerPoint (TM).

1. Marvin Minsky was fond of saying that there is nothing more dangerous than when a roomful of people all agree with each other. We don't have to worry about that in the Sugar community!!! Marvin also observed that "it's very important to have friends who can solve problems you can't." The diversity of our community is its strength.

2. John Markoff, former technology writer for the <em>NY Times</em> unearthed a link to a classic paper by Alan Kay on personal computing from 1972, "[http://mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages]". Well worth the read. Alan was actively interacting with Marvin, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon at the time.

Another Marvin quote relevant to our current quest to define ourselves as a community: "Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do." As Laura Vargas put it recently, Sugar Labs is a community "where you can learn how to design, develop and deploy high-quality Free Software." Within our community, children and adults are working together.

3. There was an article in <em>The NewYorker</em> last week, "[http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/do-we-really-need-to-learn-to-code Do we really need to learn to code?]" The authors, Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis nicely summarize many of the core challenges in the quest to harness artificial intelligence to automate computer programming, but entirely miss the point of why we need to learn to code. As Cynthia remarked more than 30 years ago, "debugging is the great educational opportunity of the 21st Century." Marcus and Davis do observe that "a good programmer understands, deeply, a problem that needs to be solved, and then creates an architecture for solving a problem that’s never been solved before." The true value of learning to code is that it engages children in the rigors and discipline of problem-solving. For must learners, computation is a "thing to think with", not an end in and of itself.

2. Sam Parkinson is our new release manager. Sam, a former GCI winner from Australia, has been responsible for many of the patches to the Sugar toolkit over the past few releases and has also been one of our most prelific code reviewers. Martin Abente, our release manager for the past four releases, has agreed to mentor Sam during the transition. Tip of the hat to Martin for all of his contributions and continued support.

4. The coding period of Google Summer of Code has officially begun. Please help us support the efforts of our six interns as they help expand the possibilities of Sugar over the next three months. [[Summer_of_Code/2016|Details]] can be found in this wiki.

3. Mariah Noelle Villarreal just got back from the Google Code-in reunion, where she represented Sugar Labs. She had a chance to meet Ezequiel and Piotr, our two winners, and spend time with members of the other participating projects. Mariah brought multiple copies of Sugar on a Stick to hand out and reports that there was a positive reception, especially among some of the parents in attendance. She also voiced some disappointment with the degree of awareness of Software Libre among attendees. FWIW, Devin Ulibarri and I are working on a new paper regarding the importance of Software Libre to education. Stay tuned.

5. A [[Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2016-05-06|summary]] of the 6 May meeting of the Sugar Labs oversight board is also available in this wiki. At that meeting, and in subsequent email discussions, we passed a motion to fund an effort to do the Yoruba internationalization and localization. We also passed a motion to finalize updating the Sugar License from GPLv2 to GPLv3. The agenda of the 3 June meeting is [[Oversight_Board/Minutes#Agenda_items|posted]] in this wiki. Among the pending motions we will be discussing are a series of motions to restructure the finance manager position; a motion to adopt the 2016 vision for Sugar Labs; a motion regarding allocation of GSoC mentoring stipends; a motion to request a membership donations; and discussion of merits of applying for inclusion in GitHub Education pack. Please join us on irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting.

4. I just got back from a trip to Santiago, Chile, where I was hosted by the education division of Fundación Chile. (Cecilia Rodriguez Alcala Garcia, formally of Educa Paraguay, was responsible for my invitation to run some workshops and give a keynote address at Creo Chile.)  The theme of my workshops was programming as a vehicle for engaging in critical thinking. I introduced Turtle Blocks and Music Blocks first to a team of engineers from throughout the foundation, then to an executive group, then to a "hacker" group attending the Creo Chile event, and finally to a group of children and their parents. I was assisted by Andrea Vasquez Garcia, without whom I would have been lost. In addition, I participated in a workshop run by a local rap artist, Nelson Bobadilla Alvarado, and an educator, Francisca Petrovich Ursic. We did a collaborative, interactive Music Blocks program, whereby we could programmatically participate in the performance. A bit crude, but I learned a lot in the process. My keynote, which I have uploaded to [http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/docs/fchBender2016.pdf], focused on Sugar and the role of Software Libre in education.

6. There has been progress along many fronts with the Music Blocks activity. Devin Ulibarri arranged for a meeting with his mentor, Larry Scripts, at the New England Conservatory (NEC) of music. Larry had positive and productive feedback for us and we hope to incorporate Music Blocks in seminar at NEC in the fall. I also had a fun meeting with Eric Rosenbaum and Derek Breen, along with Cynthia. (Eric was part of the team that created the lovely music widgets that appeared on the Google Homepage a few months back and he wrote a [http://ericrosenbaum.github.io/blockly/demos/musicblocks/ music extension to Blockly].) Eric introduced me to the sampler code in Tone.js, which I am now using for the drum set. What a difference a decent sampler can make!!! (I am using some of the samples that come bundled with the [[Activities/TamTam|Tam Tam activity]].) You can check out all of the latest updates to Music Blocks including a [http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/?file=MusicBlocks_drumexample&run=true simple drum demo] and read the updated [http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/guide guide]. I think Music Blocks is finally stable enough that we should push on the localization efforts. I will be mining some strings from Tam Tam to make the process a bit less tedious for our translation team.

In the workshop for executives, I was challenged to write a Turtle program to calculate the expected value of the number of coin flips required to get three heads or three tails in a row. My response can be seen at [http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/?file=threeinarow.tb].

 

One sub-goal of my trip was to seek advice regarding a reference machine for Sugar. Alas, I was not yet able to get a definitive answer, as the foundation does not directly distribute hardware and the ministry of education has a wide variance in the types of machines they distribute. But I hope to get some feedback on this topic in the coming weeks.

 

While I was in Santiago, Chile defeated Mexico in the Copa América. I credited the win to Sugar (and the Chilean futbol shirt I was wearing). Hopefully it will mean that Sugar will find a warn reception in Chile.

 

5. Google Summer of Code is well underway. Mentors are writing mid-term evaluations this week. Be sure to check out the great work being done by our interns, including [https://github.com/sugarlabs/edit-fonts-activity], [http://vikramahujagsoc.blogspot.in/], [https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/313#discussion_r63140566], [http://musicblocks.net/2016/06/13/multiple-rhythm-rulers/], [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAHUOBJ7fqk], and [https://iamutkarshtiwari.wordpress.com/].

 

6. On the flight back from Santiago, I wrote a Python script to convert glif files into Turtle Block projects. (Tip of the hat to Eli Heuer for providing me some sample glif files.) The results are quite fun (See [http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/?file=a.tb]). Next up, a version where each knot and control point is represented by a turtle, and thus the glyph will be editable.

=== In the Community ===

=== In the Community ===

7. Dave Crossland lead a team of volunteers on a weekend wiki gardening adventure. While there is still more work to be done, we managed to prune lots of stale material and we began migrating stable pages to the static website we maintain on GitHub. Thanks to everyone who volunteered. We'll probably have another go at it in July.

7. Gary Stager has written a nice [https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-07-as-the-maker-movement-turns-45-gary-stager-pays-tribute-to-m-i-t-computing-pioneer-cynthia-solomon tribute to Cynthia Solomon] in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Maker Movement.

 

8. There is a nice article about Sugar on a Stick in the [http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Fedora-Based-Sugar-on-a-Stick-Is-One-Sweet-Desktop-83446.html Fedora Insider] blog.

9. Devin and I wrote a response to a [http://sites.ed.gov/oese/2016/04/open-discussion-on-the-role-of-education-technologies-in-early-childhood-stem-education/ call for comments] by the US Department of Education on the role of education technologies on early childhood STEM education. Our focus was on the potential of Free/Libre Software in education. You can read our response in the [[User:Walter/DOE_Response|wiki]].

8. Our next [[Oversight_Board#Next_meeting|oversight board meeting]] is [http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?iso=20160701T15&p0=43&msg=SLOB+meeting Friday, 1 July at 19:00 UTC]. Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting.

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

10. Thomas Gilliard has documented a [[Fedora_24#livemedia-creator|mechanism for creating a livemedia-creator remix]] in Fedora 24. (The [[Build_Your_Own_Remix_with_Fedora#Install_the_necessary_software|previous mechanism]], which as dependent on livecd-creator, will be phased out soon.)

9. Sam has announced the second release leading up to Sugar 0.110. Recent changes include:

* Utkarsh Tiwari added a WiFi password visibility toggle

* Sebastian Silva fixed Broadway compatibility for `sugar-activity`

* The [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Tick_based_animation smooth animations feature] landed

* Improved Gtk 3.20 support

11. Sebastian Silva has been experimenting with [https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html GTK Broadway], a GTK backend to provide support for displaying GTK+ applications in a web browser.

Sam has been busy updating the [https://developer.sugarlabs.org/sugar3/sugar3.graphics.icon.html API documentation] and is soliciting feedback. Also, San has updated Fedora [https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/samtoday/sugar/ COPR] with the new versions of the Sugar packages. Tarballs for sugar, sugar-toolkit-gtk3 and sugar-artwork are in the usual places on the download server [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/].

12. Dave Crossland is exploring [http://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip PocketChip], which he calls "the closest thing to an XO being released this year."

10. Tom Gilliard reports the availability of Sugar spins for Fedora24 ([http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/unofficial/releases/24/x86_64/Fedora-SoaS-Live-x86_64-24-20160614.n.0.iso x86_64], [http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/unofficial/releases/24/i386/Fedora-SoaS-Live-i386-24-20160614.n.0.iso i386]).  

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

13. Please visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet].

11. Please visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet].

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