User:Yamaplos/draft

Sugar Labs Oversight Board Candidate Statement 2012-2013

Some people requested me to stand as candidate for election to the Sugar Labs Oversight Board. Their reasons were that Sugar needs the viewpoint of somebody who is/was part of a classroom with OLPC-XO/Sugar.

Some information about myself. I'm a student in Uruguay. I received an XO-1 when I was in form 5 of school, at about ten-years-old. Two years ago, I joined the Uruguayan OLPC community (CeibalJAM) which has a great mailing list where users and developers collaborate. That's a good place to get really involved into a development process, and do a transition between Sugar user and an activity developer. Some months ago I met some of the current Sugar maintainers and code contributors. Having the possibility to solve the problems that I noticed when developing activities, I started to contribute to Sugar itself. I'm also administrator of the OLPC-Sur mailing list, which in some ways is a Spanish version of IAEP.

Daniel Francis viewpoint about Sugar

1 The success and reason of Sugar

We all know Sugar can be an excellent learning platform that can be discovered by children, providing an excellent experience and getting great results (when the laptops are used successfully). I consider the work on Sugar itself is already done, but when new features are coming to Sugar thanks to Activity Central, OLPC and our volunteer contributors, Sugar needs the design team to look again at the current Sugar interface and do maintenence on the big work done on the interface.

2 Deployment frustrations

The biggest frustration regarding OLPC in schools is the low use. A big percent of the laptops with Sugar aren't used in schools toward educational objectives, due to some reasons that Sugar must face.

2.1 Identify the reasons

This is part of the learning team. Sugar Labs needs to know why some teachers don't like to teach with XOs. The biggest issues are related to the software and content. Taking this into account, Sugar Labs would be able to make action items and improve the software.

2.2 Time

Sugar is not intended to be a productivity environment, but a productivity environment actually is what a very small percentage of highschool teachers in Uruguay are implementing technology in their classroom for. They have 45 minutes per class, and a long list of content to have taught by the end of the year, so they need a ¡ most comfortable and fast model, with results similar to the traditional class, and have no opportunities or time to try and discover the environment like the children could.

Here Sugar needs work in usability and accessibility, not only simplicity, because it is not about limitations in understanding.

The work in classroom needs to be fast and easy trough improving the usability in activities like Browse, Write, Paint, Labyrinth, et al. but there are other activities such as TurtleBlocks or Scratch that are valid for spending extra time in longer classes or homework.

2.3 Training of teachers

The main problem of an interface made to be discovered is that it can't be used by people who don't want to discover it. This is the case of a big part of the teachers. Their only tool to learn how to use Sugar and the only way to interest them in using Sugar in their classroom is through teaching training. This is something which doesn't depend of Sugar Labs, but the current Sugar documentation is not maintained, and could be converted in the best place for the teachers to spend time learning.

3 School content adaptation

The current tools can be adapted by each teacher to their educational requirements. As an example, children can write better and learn to write by using the Write activity instead of a piece of paper, because with the Write activity they can organise their ideas and move the paragraphs to make a well written text. Sugar needs a way to show the teachers these advantages and perhaps it's through improving the documentation that this can be achieved.

Some new activities need to be created keeping in mind the school program items, good examples are the "I know ..." activities, related to geography.