Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

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===Sugar Digest ===
 
===Sugar Digest ===
  
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1. Five Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2009. We are excited about all five proposals; our only regret is that we were unable to accept any more of the promising proposals we received. Thank you to everyone who participated in the selection process—the feedback on the proposals from the community has been especially of great value.
+
1. A teacher in Uruguay, Rosamel Ramirez, initiated [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2009-April/003166.html a discussion on the Sur list] this weekend about her frustration with the volume of technical discussion and the dearth of education discussion on the list. Several proposals to address the situation have been raised, including Yamandu Ploskonka's proposal for a fork, where teachers would have their own list, and Hernán Pachas's proposal to use tags in the Subject Field to indicate [Pedagogical], [Technical], and [Social] threads within a single list.  
  
−
To all of those who were not selected this year, we appreciate your efforts and hope that you will be able to find time to participate in the Sugar Labs community in some fashion this summer. We hope you'll reapply next year.
+
It is always a difficult decision to fork a list. As Paolo Benini from Montevideo pointed out, in a new project, where we are all learning from each other, it becomes difficult to know where to ask questions when the community is fragmented.
  
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To those of you who were selected this year, both mentors and students, let's converge on a regular weekly meeting time in IRC to exchange notes on progress and problems. Individual teams should, of course, make arrangements for regular meeting times as well. In general, let's continue to hang out on #sugar, so that the developer community can stay abreast of what is happening.
+
My hope is that the teachers will be willing to give Hernán's proposal a try and that they do continue to participate, as they represent the primary means of closing the loop between our engineering efforts and our end-users, the children.
  
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Kudos to Jamison Quinn for organizing our GSoC efforts and seeing to all of the details. Finally, thanks once again to Google for this opportunity.
+
2. Meanwhile, Evita Preciosa from Peru asked if there were any recent studies indicating the efficacy of Sugar/OLPC. I was quite pleased with these results, as reported by Hernán (apparently, a formal report will be issued soon).
  
−
:Student: Lucian Branescu Mihaila
+
Have there been improved levels of reading comprehension?
−
:Project: Webified
 
−
:Mentor: Walter Bender
 
  
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:Student: Sascha Silbe
+
:Reading comprehension of children in primary levels has been improved by approximately 50%.
−
:Project: Version support for Sugar datastore and Journal
 
−
:Mentor: Jameson Quinn
 
  
−
:Student: Felipe Lopez Toledo
+
Does increased use of computing (and Sugar) improve student achievement?
−
:Project: Karma + Activities
 
−
:Mentor: Bryan Berry
 
  
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:Student: Vamsi Krishna Davuluri
+
:Student achievement is measured by many variables; we have seen improved reading comprehension, text analysis, and mathematical analysis.
−
:Project: Adding Print Support to the XOs
 
−
:Mentor: Andres Ambrois
 
  
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:Student: Benjamin Schwartz
+
Have you seen improved logical thinking?
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:Project: Decentralized Asynchronous Collision-free Editing with Groupthink
 
−
:Mentor: Assim Deodia
 
  
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2. Caroline Meeks and I spent last Saturday at the Waltham YMCA where we exercised Sugar on a Stick with children and their parents visiting the Y for Healthy Kids Day. (I had to leave early to meet to attend to some sewer problems—don't ask.) All in all, it was a great day.  
+
:We have seen improved the logical mathematical thinking, but we need more work on this subject (more activities are need in this area).
  
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From the technical point of view, Sugar on a Stick lived up to its billing. We were able to get all but one of the mismatched castaway PCs to boot, even some of which would not boot into Windows XP. (The one machine that did not boot would not power on at all—not something we could fix with software.) We did have one machine with an invisible cursor, but otherwise it ran fine. Sound worked on every machine that had speakers. We were able to assign static IP addresses and every machine was able to connect to the Internet. However something was preventing collaboration to work: we could see each other, but not share activities or interact with other users connected to jabber.sugarlabs.org. We have some debugging to do. Ideally, we would have brought a school server in to assign IP addresses, which would have assured that at least local collaboration worked.
+
Have students improved their ability to analyze the texts they read?
  
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Caroline will be writing up detailed notes on the children's use of Sugar throughout the day. The way things were organized, parents and children were dropping in to the room at any time during the day. We had in the room anywhere from two to six children, as young as two and as old as seven or eight, while I was there. They went right to the machines without any introduction to Sugar. Most of the machines were either already running an activity or had the Home View visible. Popular activities included Memorize, where some children went so far as to design their own games, Jigsaw Puzzle, Turtle Art, Speak, Write, and Mini Tam Tam.
+
:They have increased by almost 60% in all primary levels.
  
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While hardly a typical classroom setting, things went quite well with this somewhat haphazard introduction to Sugar: the children were engaged, as were their parents. However there was not time enough for them to discover or exploit features such as the Journal. And since collaboration was not working, all of the interactions were solo. Undoubtedly there is some more scaffolding we can provide children and parents new to Sugar. (We've already had some follow-up discussions on how to best integrate examples into activities and how to make the views and frame more readily discoverable on non-OLPC-XO hardware.)
+
Are students more creative?
 +
 
 +
:The texts produced by children and teachers demonstrate more creativity; also there is improvement in writing and spelling.
 +
 
 +
Are the students gaining skills and problem solving skills?
 +
 
 +
:The students are using skills gained to help their parents (farmers or ranchers) to improve their activities.
  
 
===In the community===
 
===In the community===
  
−
3. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal. These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.
+
3. Daniel Drake reports that they just finished handing out 3500 laptops (running Sugar 0.82) in Paraguay: many happy children.
 +
 
 +
4. Luis Acevedo reprots that there was a Sugar booth at the FLISOL 2009 meeting in Santiago, Chile last Saturday on April 25. Sugar on a Stick was featured and the response was quite positive; many attendees were interested in trying it (See http://picasaweb.google.es/patitoacevedo/Flisol2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCPD04-2G-9byCA&feat=directlink).
 +
 
 +
5. Caryl Bigenho reports that the XO computer and Sugar software were a hit at the LAUSD InfoTech event at the Los Angeles Convention center.
 +
 
 +
"So many people fell in love with the XO and wanted to know how to get them.  When I explained the current situation of needing large orders they were crestfallen.  But then they brightened up when I explained the alternatives:
 +
 
 +
* Buy a machine from an online auction such as ebay.  Some parents found this an interesting option.
 +
* Run SoaS on the computers they already have or on others they can buy easily "off the shelf." Both teachers and parents were interested in this option.
 +
* Create a really great new idea for using the XO with students and apply for contributors machines to develop and test the idea. A large number of teachers were interested in doing this.  It will be interesting to see how many follow through."
 +
 
 +
Caryl also invited the educators to sign up to receive information about a new open-source interest group forming within the CUE (Computer Using Educators) organization in California. 
 +
 
 +
6. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal. These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.
  
 
There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar meeting]]) where we will be discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.  
 
There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar meeting]]) where we will be discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.  
 +
 +
===Help Wanted===
 +
 +
7. Sayamindu Dasgupta has made some sketches of a Gnuemeric port to Sugar based on its new libspreadsheet library (See http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/spreadsheet/Screenshot.png). It would be great if someone where to take on the task of making a proper Gnumeric activity.
 +
 +
8. MIT Community Service is giving us a grant to support an intern this summer to work on the Gardner School deployment (in Allston, Massachusetts). Please contact Caroline Meeks if you are interested in the position.
  
 
===Tech Talk===
 
===Tech Talk===
  
−
4. Christian Marc Schmidt led a discussion of potential 0.86 improvements to the UI in a Design Team meeting this past weekend. Together, we came up with a list of design goals to possibly include in our development schedule for 0.86, with concrete tasks to be accomplished in advance of SugarCamp. Christian added a meeting summary on the wiki, along with a link to the transcript: [[Design_Team/Meetings]]
+
9. We held the first "mini developers tutorial" this week on IRC. The idea is to feature a topic in a five minute tutorial. The topic this week was keyboard shortcuts. From the [http://meeting.laptop.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090423_1000.html log] you can see that we ended up going on much longer than the alloted five minutes, discussing keyboard shortcuts more generally, but the tutorial part of the discussion was indeed short and to the point.
 +
 
 +
If you'd be interested in hosting a tutorial, please sign up at [[Development_Team/Mini_tutorials|Mini Tutorials]].
 +
 
 +
The next meeting will be held on Thursday, 30 April, at 18:00 UTC. The topic is "Using IRC". It will be run both in IRC on irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting, and in chat on jabber.sugarlabs.org (using the Sugar Chat activity).
 +
 
 +
10. Sascha Silbe removed Ubuntu Jaunty from the list of supported versions. He will add it back once Xephyr and X inside kvm work (See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-vesa/+bug/356133).
 +
 
 +
In a related post, David Van Assche reports that due to "the sad state" of Ubuntu Sugar, he and his friends packaged Sugar for openSUSE.
  
−
5. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078 Labyrinth] Paola Bruccoleri, a teacher from Uruguay has already tried the new version and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps
+
11. Sebastian Dziallas has put together [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware a page in the wiki]] to guide us through the process of using the [http://www.smolts.org/ Smolt project] to track the various hardware systems running Sugar on a Stick. You'll need to use the latest snapshop, which has Smolt included, in order to submit your hardware specifications.
−
with it (See http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Imagen:Labyrinth6-Tutorial.pdf). Aleksey also released a new version of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081 Record].
 
  
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6. In response to a discussion on IRC this week, we will experiment with some mini Developer tutorials, with the goal of sharing techniques on activity development. I'll launch the series with a brief session on keyboard shortcuts this week on #sugar on irc.freenode.net following Thursday's weekly developer meeting.
+
12. Sayamindu announced that Pootle has shifted to a new and improved home. Pootle is accessible from translate.sugarlabs.org (and translate.laptop.org); All your user preferences, translations, accounts, etc. are preserved and dev.laptop.org/translate should redirect to the new address. The new server is much more responsive. Many thanks to Sayamindu and the localization team for their hard work.
  
 
===Sugar Labs ===
 
===Sugar Labs ===
  
−
7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-April-11-17-som.jpg|SOM]]).
+
13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-April-18-24-som.jpg|SOM]]).
  
 
=== Community News archive ===
 
=== Community News archive ===

Revision as of 07:33, 27 April 2009

What's new

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 and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

1. A teacher in Uruguay, Rosamel Ramirez, initiated a discussion on the Sur list this weekend about her frustration with the volume of technical discussion and the dearth of education discussion on the list. Several proposals to address the situation have been raised, including Yamandu Ploskonka's proposal for a fork, where teachers would have their own list, and Hernán Pachas's proposal to use tags in the Subject Field to indicate [Pedagogical], [Technical], and [Social] threads within a single list.

It is always a difficult decision to fork a list. As Paolo Benini from Montevideo pointed out, in a new project, where we are all learning from each other, it becomes difficult to know where to ask questions when the community is fragmented.

My hope is that the teachers will be willing to give Hernán's proposal a try and that they do continue to participate, as they represent the primary means of closing the loop between our engineering efforts and our end-users, the children.

2. Meanwhile, Evita Preciosa from Peru asked if there were any recent studies indicating the efficacy of Sugar/OLPC. I was quite pleased with these results, as reported by Hernán (apparently, a formal report will be issued soon).

Have there been improved levels of reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension of children in primary levels has been improved by approximately 50%.

Does increased use of computing (and Sugar) improve student achievement?

Student achievement is measured by many variables; we have seen improved reading comprehension, text analysis, and mathematical analysis.

Have you seen improved logical thinking?

We have seen improved the logical mathematical thinking, but we need more work on this subject (more activities are need in this area).

Have students improved their ability to analyze the texts they read?

They have increased by almost 60% in all primary levels.

Are students more creative?

The texts produced by children and teachers demonstrate more creativity; also there is improvement in writing and spelling.

Are the students gaining skills and problem solving skills?

The students are using skills gained to help their parents (farmers or ranchers) to improve their activities.

In the community

3. Daniel Drake reports that they just finished handing out 3500 laptops (running Sugar 0.82) in Paraguay: many happy children.

4. Luis Acevedo reprots that there was a Sugar booth at the FLISOL 2009 meeting in Santiago, Chile last Saturday on April 25. Sugar on a Stick was featured and the response was quite positive; many attendees were interested in trying it (See http://picasaweb.google.es/patitoacevedo/Flisol2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCPD04-2G-9byCA&feat=directlink).

5. Caryl Bigenho reports that the XO computer and Sugar software were a hit at the LAUSD InfoTech event at the Los Angeles Convention center.

"So many people fell in love with the XO and wanted to know how to get them. When I explained the current situation of needing large orders they were crestfallen. But then they brightened up when I explained the alternatives:

  • Buy a machine from an online auction such as ebay. Some parents found this an interesting option.
  • Run SoaS on the computers they already have or on others they can buy easily "off the shelf." Both teachers and parents were interested in this option.
  • Create a really great new idea for using the XO with students and apply for contributors machines to develop and test the idea. A large number of teachers were interested in doing this. It will be interesting to see how many follow through."

Caryl also invited the educators to sign up to receive information about a new open-source interest group forming within the CUE (Computer Using Educators) organization in California.

6. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal. These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.

There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See Paris Sugar meeting) where we will be discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.

Help Wanted

7. Sayamindu Dasgupta has made some sketches of a Gnuemeric port to Sugar based on its new libspreadsheet library (See Screenshot.png). It would be great if someone where to take on the task of making a proper Gnumeric activity.

8. MIT Community Service is giving us a grant to support an intern this summer to work on the Gardner School deployment (in Allston, Massachusetts). Please contact Caroline Meeks if you are interested in the position.

Tech Talk

9. We held the first "mini developers tutorial" this week on IRC. The idea is to feature a topic in a five minute tutorial. The topic this week was keyboard shortcuts. From the log you can see that we ended up going on much longer than the alloted five minutes, discussing keyboard shortcuts more generally, but the tutorial part of the discussion was indeed short and to the point.

If you'd be interested in hosting a tutorial, please sign up at Mini Tutorials.

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, 30 April, at 18:00 UTC. The topic is "Using IRC". It will be run both in IRC on irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting, and in chat on jabber.sugarlabs.org (using the Sugar Chat activity).

10. Sascha Silbe removed Ubuntu Jaunty from the list of supported versions. He will add it back once Xephyr and X inside kvm work (See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-vesa/+bug/356133).

In a related post, David Van Assche reports that due to "the sad state" of Ubuntu Sugar, he and his friends packaged Sugar for openSUSE.

11. Sebastian Dziallas has put together Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware a page in the wiki to guide us through the process of using the Smolt project to track the various hardware systems running Sugar on a Stick. You'll need to use the latest snapshop, which has Smolt included, in order to submit your hardware specifications.

12. Sayamindu announced that Pootle has shifted to a new and improved home. Pootle is accessible from translate.sugarlabs.org (and translate.laptop.org); All your user preferences, translations, accounts, etc. are preserved and dev.laptop.org/translate should redirect to the new address. The new server is much more responsive. Many thanks to Sayamindu and the localization team for their hard work.

Sugar Labs

13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

25 Apr 2009 Free Software Magazine – The Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
24 Apr 2009 Ars Technica – First taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
22 Apr 2009 Betanews – Beta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
27 Mar 2009 Mass High Tech – Google promotes summer open-source internships
18 Mar 2009 Metropolis – A Good Argument
16 Mar 2009 Laptop Magazine – Sugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market Watch – Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DC – Learning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomy – Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus Magazine – Sugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the Penguins – The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC News – Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerr – thoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars Technica – OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC News – An Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC News – Sugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open Source – Sugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomy – Bender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC – '$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

See our Press Page

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