Changes

3. I struck gold in a meeting at Plan Ceibal. Mónica Báez arranged for me to meet with her team, which is driving the curriculum development and teacher training for the project. Among them is a math teacher who is responsible to the math teacher-training program and who was really taken with some of Tony Forster's Turtle Block examples and another teacher who is interested in a way to connect art and science; she is specifically interested in having the students interpret data from sensors graphically (along the lines of [http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/]). At her urging, I fixed some bugs in the SVG export function of Turtle Blocks (patches pushed to git and part of the upcoming v108 release). We also discussed ways to broaden outreach to the community as they see great value in what we are doing.

3. I struck gold in a meeting at Plan Ceibal. Mónica Báez arranged for me to meet with her team, which is driving the curriculum development and teacher training for the project. Among them is a math teacher who is responsible to the math teacher-training program and who was really taken with some of Tony Forster's Turtle Block examples and another teacher who is interested in a way to connect art and science; she is specifically interested in having the students interpret data from sensors graphically (along the lines of [http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/]). At her urging, I fixed some bugs in the SVG export function of Turtle Blocks (patches pushed to git and part of the upcoming v108 release). We also discussed ways to broaden outreach to the community as they see great value in what we are doing.

4. I am going to be giving another talk in Uruguay at the end of the month at Squeakfest. I plan to pick up on a theme I only scratched the surface of at my EduJam talk: that learning software should not be complete. I have discussed this theme in the past in the context of breaking the mindset that learning is a service that can be downloaded. And again within the context of the "There's an app for that" discussion ([http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Archive/Current_Events/2009-06-23]). But I want to go even further: we should be engaging the learner to  

4. I am going to be giving another talk in Uruguay at the end of the month at Squeakfest. I plan to pick up on a theme I only scratched the surface of at my EduJam talk: that learning software should not be complete. I have discussed this theme in the past in the context of breaking the mindset that learning is a service that can be downloaded. And again within the context of the "There's an app for that" discussion ([http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Archive/Current_Events/2009-06-23]). But I want to go even further: we should be engaging the learner to always take the next step, whether in creating their own memory game to designing their own abacus to extending Turtle Blocks.

5. I finally met Christofer, the 12-year-old hacker from Uruguay to whom I sent an XO laptop last year. He attended Sugar Camp where Martin Abente taught him how to use git and vi. He and I are going to work on an SVG editor together. Meanwhile, Ignacio, another 12-year-old is helping me with some extensions to the Portfolio project.

5. I finally met Christofer, the 12-year-old hacker from Uruguay to whom I sent an XO laptop last year. He attended Sugar Camp where Martin Abente taught him how to use git and vi. He and I are going to work on an SVG editor together. Meanwhile, Ignacio, another 12-year-old is helping me with some extensions to the Portfolio project.