Sugar on a Stick/Coconut

Sugar on a Stick - Coconut

a Sugar environment you can carry in your pocket

Coconut is the most recent version of Sugar on a Stick, and will be released in July 2010.

Release announcement

We are proud to announce the availability of Sugar on a Stick v5 Coconut. More information about Sugar on a Stick, including download and installation details, is available at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/.

What's new in Coconut

Sugar version 0.92. The most recent release of the Sugar Learning Platform features support for ad hoc Wi-Fi networks, which expands the "under a tree"-scenario to standard Wi-Fi enabled devices. There are also new capabilities in the learner's interface, including a spiral home view, enhanced color selector, and Journal sorting. A lot of under the hood improvements for stability have been included, as usual. More information about the 0.92 release of Sugar is available at 0.92.

Customize your own remix of Sugar on a Stick. Coconut has a slightly larger Activity selection than its predecessor Mango Lassi and has continued the trend of providing a few, better-tested Activities. We've realized that we'll never be able to create an Activity selection suitable for all deployments—instead, we've chosen to include and support a core set of basic, teacher-tested Activities in the default image, and invite deployments to use this as a base on which to build a customized Activity selection for their classrooms.

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Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora Spin. Since SoaS v3 Mirabelle, Sugar on a Stick has been recognized by the Fedora Project as an official Spin. This ties us more closely to Fedora's release cycle and gives us resources from their engineering and marketing teams, which extends the reach of Sugar on a Stick and makes the project itself more sustainable. In exchange, users of Fedora have access to an easily deployable implementation of the Sugar Platform; it's a great example of a mutually beneficial upstream–downstream relationship.

Contributing to Sugar on a Stick

With v5 of Sugar on a Stick, the team recognizes the need to continue to improve its release processes and engineering sustainability. New contributors are urged to get involved and help us move towards our long-term vision of bringing stability and deployability to Sugar's personalized learning environment.

If you'd like to contribute to the next version, due for release in November of 2011, join our mailing list and visit Sugar on a Stick. All types of contributions are welcome, from the technical to the pedagogical, and we're happy to teach what we know and learn what you have to share.

Thank you to all the people involved for their awesome work!

Release history

Introduction

This section is a recap of the events during the v5 Coconut release cycle of Sugar on a Stick.

Re-approved as a Fedora Spin

"[Spins are alternate versions of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations." --from http://spins.fedoraproject.org/about

See the release notes for v3 and v4 for history on the transition to a Fedora Spin.

Feature process

• Features/Soas_V5/

QA

Thomas did field-testing (building real SoaS sticks from .iso files and testing on those) - it's the closest thing to systematic testing we've had yet, though we still have a ways to go. Thank you also to James Cameron in Australia for his testing help!

Documentation

A new release of documentation should come out with each new release of SoaS (although resources have prevented this).

The Fedora-site documentation may not be an improvement over our Sugar Labs, ad hoc wiki documentation methods, as the tools needed to participate are more complicated, and the Spin page documentation is not open to editing. The Fedora Sugar on a Stick pages have not been edited since Mirabelle was released in May 2010. The attempt to better support a small number of known, working, "how to set up SoaS", instructions has not yet been fulfilled.

Major accomplishments this release cycle

• Expanded discussion with upstream Fedora especially Fedora QA team and the new AutoQA processes. Initial integration in the Fedora Desktop QA testing process with initial guidelines and test process created. This will be expanded in Fedora 15 for the SoaS v5 release.

Press coverage

Feel free to add links to press coverage you find about Mango Lassi to this section.