Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 09:02, 2 February 2012

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, blogged at walterbender.org, and archived here.) 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. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intregued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chololate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are inspectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) "Points" calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from File:Food-plugin.tar.gz.

Next up is to create a palatte with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [1] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me?

2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X a week ago. You can read about it here: [2]

3. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our finances--Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report, so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding opportunities.

2. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for potential feature requests. Stay tuned.

In the community

6. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.

7. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).

Tech Talk

8. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 have (for the most part) landed. Under the hood, we'll see a migration to GTK-3. This is particularly important in "future-proofing" Sugar, ensuring that we remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism, written by Gonzalo Odiard. You'll be able to highlight text in any activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting Browse to Webkit as its backend. Simon helped me with "write to journal anytime", a feature that enables the user to takes notes stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha Silbe, Anish Mangal, and Aleksey Lim have added proxy configuration to the network entry in the Sugar control panel. Lots of QA to do, but the heavy lifting is done.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list:

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

11 Jan 2012	Boston Herald – One Laptop Per Child screening $100 tablet
10 Jan 2012	ars technica – Crank, bicycle, and waterwheel: hands-on with the OLPC XO 3.0 tablet
08 Jan 2012	The Verge – OLPC XO 3.0 tablet preview: impressions, video, and pictures
07 Jan 2012	The Verge – OLPC XO 3.0 tablet: an 8-inch tablet for $100, with Android and Sugar options for the children
23 Dec 2011	Miller-McCune – One Laptop Per Child Redux
18 Oct 2011	BDU – Robotics in Uruguay (video)
11 Aug 2011	Berlin.de – Gewinner des Berliner Landeswettbewerbs zu Open Source stehen fest
25 Jul 2011	CCC Classic – Garmin-sugarlabs development cycling team at Crit starting line
25 Jul 2011	CCC Classic – Garmin-sugarlabs development cycling team after Crit
13 Apr 2011	framablog – L'expérience Sugar Labs préfigure-t-elle une révolution éducative du XXIe siècle?
05 Apr 2011	Businesswire – The Government of Peru Expands the One Laptop Per Child Program with Local Manufacturing
31 Jan 2011	Sundance – A Day in the Life – Peru
01 Dec 2010	velonation – Sugar Labs to back Garmin-Cervelo’s development team in unique arrangement
28 Oct 2010	UCR – Nuevas tecnologías deben estar al alcance de todos los niños y niñas
05 Oct 2010	xconomy – One Ecosystem per Child
08 Sep 2010	FLOSS Weekly – Sugar Labs
09 Aug 2010	ABC digital – Indicadores constatan el impacto positivo en el aprendizaje de niños
23 Jun 2010	ABC digital – Xo para todas las escuelas de Caacupé
21 Jun 2010	La Nacion – “Buscamos que los niños no solo usen softwares, sino que puedan crear uno”
20 Jun 2010	UltimaHora.com – La laptop une a padres, alumnos y docentes
15 Jun 2010	The H – OLPC XO-1.5 software updated
10 Jun 2010	engadget – Sugar on a Stick hits 3.0, teaches us about a new kind of fruit
27 May 2010	Pro Linux DE – Sugar on a Stick v3 freigegeben (German)
27 May 2010	NY Times – One Laptop Per Child Project Works With Marvell to Produce a $100 Tablet
27 May 2010	PC World – OLPC Rules out Windows for XO-3
03 May 2010	WXXI: Mixed Media – Interview with Walter Bender (audio)
03 May 2010	Linux Magazine – OLPC Computers for Palestinian Refugee Children
14 Apr 2010	National Science Foundation – XO Laptops Inspire Learning In Birmingham, Alabama (video)
02 Apr 2010	Dailymotion – Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar... (video)
15 Mar 2010	nbc13.com – Birmingham City students opt to spend spring break in class, XO computer camps (video)
18 Feb 2010	LWN – Karma targets easier creation of educational software
05 Feb 2010	iprofesional – La PC barata de Negroponte desembarca en la Argentina para pelear contra Intel
14 Jan 2010	AALF – Open Systems for Broader Change
03 Jan 2010	Educacion 2.0 – PLAN CEIBAL, El Libro
14 Dec 2009	xconomy – Sugar gets sweeter
10 Dec 2009	ars technica – Sugar software environment gets sweeter with version 2
09 Dec 2009	Wired – New Sugar on a Stick Brings Much Needed Improvements
08 Dec 2009	engadget – Sugar on a Stick OS goes to 2.0, gets Blueberry coating and creamy Fedora 12 center (video)
07 Dec 2009	Teleread.org – Sugar on a Stick: What it means for e-books and education
27 Nov 2009	CNET Japan – 「コードを見せて、もっと良くなるよ」と言える子どもが生まれる--Sugar Labsが描く未来
16 Nov 2009	zanichelli – software libero a scuola
12 Nov 2009	opensuse.org – openSUSE 11.2 Released
07 Nov 2009	My Broadband News – Mandriva 2010 packs a punch [and Sugar]
06 Nov 2009	GhanaWeb – Open education and an IT-enabled economic growth in Ghana: Musings of a dutiful citizen
26 Oct 2009	Linux Magazine ES – Software Libre como apoyo al aprendizaje
09 Oct 2009	interdisciplines – OLPC and Sugar: mobility through the community
08 Oct 2009	IBM developerWorks – 10 important Linux developments everyone should know about
01 Oct 2009	OLPC France – Interview Walter Bender au SugarCamp
25 Sep 2009	The Inquirer – One Laptop per Child marches on
18 Sep 2009	Groklaw – The Role of Free Software in Education
18 Sep 2009	Reuters – Sugar Labs and Free Software Foundation Celebrate Software Freedom Day
17 Sep 2009	ICTDev.org – Dream Again with One Laptop per Child
26 Aug 2009	Latinux – Azúcar en una memoria USB
03 Aug 2009	Wired: Geek Dad – Inventing a New Paradigm: SugarLabs and the Sugar UI
30 Jul 2009	Zanichelli – Sugar on a Stick: imparare insieme
23 Jul 2009	Everything USB – RecycleUSB.com - Donate your Flash Drives for a Good Cause
22 Jul 2009	OLPC France – Sugar : mauvaise presse et mise au point
13 Jul 2009	Spiegel Online – Das zuckersüße Leichtbau-Linux
07 Jul 2009	ComputerWorldUK – Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts
06 Jul 2009	Windows Forest – USBメモリなどから“OLPC”用のOSを利用できる「Sugar on a Stick」が無償公開
02 Jul 2009	Howard County Library – Sugar on a Stick
27 Jun 2009	Deutschlandfunk – Süßes für die Kleinen: Sugar ist Linux speziell für Kinder (in Deutsch)
26 Jun 2009	EduTech – Sugar on a stick, and other delectables (praise for the lowly USB drive)
26 Jun 2009	ars technica – Sugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms
24 Jun 2009	BBC – OLPC software to power aging PCs
24 Jun 2009	Technology Review – $100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
15 Jun 2009	TechSavvyKids – Episode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
10 Jun 2009	LWN.net – Sugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
27 May 2009	LWN.net – Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
27 May 2009	Business Wire – Dailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
01 May 2009	Guysoft – Nokia N810 Running OLPC Sugar
29 Apr 2009	El Mercurio – Así se vivió la fiesta del software libre
27 Apr 2009	ostatic – Sugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
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

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 == Sugar Digest ==
-. I was in Colombia last week and had a chance to meet up with some Sugar hackers in Bogota. It was nice to catch up with Rafael Ortiz and Pilar Saenz and to meet Fabian Prieto. The interest in Sugar in Colombia is on the rise, so it is great that there is a local community that can offer support.
+. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intregued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chololate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are inspectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) "Points" calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from [[File:Food-plugin.tar.gz]].
-In Cali, I met with [http://eduteka.org Eduteka], a comprehensive education portal used throughout the region. I gave them a mini-Turtle Art workshop with the goal that they would be able to write a plugin for a simple USB IO device that they have built.
+Next up is to create a palatte with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me?
-. Speaking of USB IO devices, [http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/01/arduino-and-xo-laptop.html Tony Forster is having fun] with the [http://www.freetronics.com/pages/leostick-quickstart-guide Freetronics Leostick], an Arduino "on a stick". It looks really cute. I haven't been able to find a price for it anywhere on the Freetronics website, but it looks quite promising. [http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/01/wedo-plugin-for-turtle-art.html Tony] also pulled together a [[File:Wedo_plugin.tar.gz|WeDo plugin]] for Turtle Art into shape (based on the work of [https://github.com/itdaniher/WeDoMore/tree/master/TurtleArt Ian Daniher]).
+[[File:Food-plugin.png|250px]]
-. Speaking of Turtle Art plugins, I have begun working on a new plugin to explore nutrition. The idea is to have a variety of food "blocks", each representing a polynomial description of their nutritional value. Numerical value blocks will accumulate factors such as calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, calcium, iron, fiber, salt, vitamin A, vitamin C, saturated fats, cholesterol, et al. The blocks can then be used to calculate the various nutritional value of a recipe or diet. Eventually, I'd like to add various operations such as the impact of cooking. Stay tuned.
+. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X a week ago. You can read about it here: [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014837.html]
-. Along with Pacita Pena and Martin Oesterreich, the first release version of the [http://git.sugarlabs.org/icanread I Can Read activity] is just about ready. Keep an eye out on activities.sugarlabs.org.
+. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our finances--Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report, so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding opportunities.
-. Quote of the week: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." &mdash;Richard Feynman
+. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for potential feature requests. Stay tuned.
 === In the community ===
 . There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.
+. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).
 === Tech Talk ===
-. The Devel Team has been making great progress on the [[0.96/Feature_List|new features for Sugar 0.96]].
+. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 have (for the most part) landed. Under the hood, we'll see a migration to GTK-3. This is particularly important in "future-proofing" Sugar, ensuring that we remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism, written by Gonzalo Odiard. You'll be able to highlight text in any activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting Browse to Webkit as its backend. Simon helped me with "write to journal anytime", a feature that enables the user to takes notes stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha Silbe, Anish Mangal, and Aleksey Lim have added proxy configuration to the network entry in the Sugar control panel. Lots of QA to do, but the heavy lifting is done.
-. AlanJAS (Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn) has embarked upon an ASLO cleanup. See [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AntaXnq4oy2_dHpvZHhLeGRQYzc1cDlRZU9Mc1NldGc] for the details on all of his analysis work. There are many small tasks that need attention. Please jump in to help if you have time.
-. Sugar is a learning community: I love reading Sascha Silbe's patch reviews. I learn something every time.
 === Sugar Labs ===
@@ Line 34: / Line 32: @@
 <gallery>
-File:2012-January-7-13-som.jpg|2012 Jan 7th-13th (45 emails)
+[[File:2012-Jan-21-27-som.jpg|2012 Jan 21st-27th]] (41 emails)
+[[File:2012-Jan-14-20-som.jpg 2012 Jan 14th-20th]] (28 emails)
 </gallery>
-Visit our [plant.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
+Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
 == Community News archive ==