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Line 4: − + − + − deal with before we are officially members of the Software Freedom − Conservancy. In preparation, I've made a lot of changes on the − − + − − * [http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-July/001275.html Sugar Labs, LOGO and Brian Harvey] − * [http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-July/001279.html reconstructed maths] − + − Sugar in the hands of children in the various OLPC deployments around − − 4. Clarity: When talking about Sugar, I never have trouble describing+ − the collaboration features or the reflective nature of the Journal, − but I struggle with describing the interface in terms of its − simplicity. "Simplicity" has an undertone of "dumbed down" and limited − capability. In a discussion with Nathan Felde from the Art Institute − of Boston, a division of Lesley University, we used the word − "clarity", which immediately struck me as a much better term than − simplicity. It doesn't imply any limit and it suggests transparency − and openness, both hallmarks of the interface. − 5. Studio Thinking: Nathan also introduced me to a book, ''Studio+ − Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education'' by Lois Hetland,+ − Ellen Winner, Shirley Veneema, and Kimberly M. Sheridan. It is a+ − treatise on visual arts education; the authors argue that through the+ − arts, students learn specific "dispositions of mind" that lead to+ − high-quality thinking. They also speak about "Studio Habits of Mind":+ − develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe,+ − reflect, stretch and explore, and understand the world and "Studio+ − Structures": the demonstration/ lecture, students working, and the − critique. It seems there is synergy with many of the goals of Sugar. − An open question is how to transfer this thinking beyond the visual − arts. + + + − 6. Release process: Marco Pesenti Gritti and Michael Stone have been+ − discussing how to integrate the Sugar and OLPC release processes:+ − * SugarLabs should try to schedule its release a few months before the+ − OLPC release target date (something around 2–3 months). That will give+ − us enough time to ensure everything is stable before we start+ − integrating the new code in the OLPC distribution.+ − * Sugar developers employed by OLPC will work on OLPC release+ − contracts for all the new features present in the new release. − * After the first stable release SugarLabs will keep releasing minor − updates, which will include bug fixes and strings for the OLPC − release. − * We should make an effort to develop all the features required as − part of the unstable development cycle. Though there surely will be − cases where OLPC will need changes outside the normal SugarLabs − schedule. We will land these in a limited and controlled way both − during the freeze periods and as part of the stable minor releases. − 7. Sucrose: Simon Schampijer announced the Sucrose Development Release+ − 0.81.6 this week − − can test it in OLPC joyride >= 2129. − This first release after the feature freeze and therefore has only bug+ − fixes. It contains as well a new Browse activity (Version 92). Due to − an interface change in xulrunner the downloads were broken in Joyride. − They are fixed with this Browse release. Simon Schampijer added − refinements to the autocompletion feature #7281 and #7280. − Due to a name change of the Browse activity (Web->Browse) you will+ − likely have problems updating to the latest version. Find instructions − here to work around that problem − − The sources can be found here:+ − + + + − * #7438 sugar shuts down when you click Restart+ − * #7365 Invites not working − * #7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior − * #7339 CPU Spins after starting an activity − * #7015 Add proper alignment support to the "tray" control − * #5613 Cannot set non-ASCII nick name − * #7046 Deleting activity bundle with journal leaves it showing in Home list view until reboot − * #7391 Make the search field in Home reveal the list view − * #7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior − * #7272 Notifications are redundant with new launching feedback − * #7273 Activity icons remain colored after launch − Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release (as well to the+ − translation team for adding new languages and updating existing ones). − 8. Handwriting: Julka Lipkova has been working on software for+ − teaching children handwriting ([http://code.google.com/p/olpc-dhw/ handwriting activity]); − more details are available at http://olpc-dhw.blogspot.com/. − 9. Movie portal: DailyMotion, which has an ogg-friendly website, is+ − planning a video campaign to solicit new uploaded materials for OLPC − − 10. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar continues to progress on documenting+ − the community's best coding practices and conventions+ − + − 11. SocialCalc: Manusheel Gupta reports that the Dan Bricklin,+ − co-inventor of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet), Luke Closs, and K.S.+ − Preeti have SocialCalc (a spreadsheet activity) in Sugar. This is the − first Sugar activity written in JavaScript (JS) to have been − integrated to Python-based Sugar environment. They did this through − XOCom, a wrapper function. The XOCom package will encourage the JS − community to participate in developing software and content for Sugar − − and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Install_an_activity Installation instructions]). − 12. Physics: Brian Jordan and Alex Levenson have made great progress+ − on the Physics activity − ([http://dev.laptop.org/~bjordan/Physics-0.2.xo Physics-0.2.xo]). Brian is planning a − Physics Jam for late August − ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_meetings/July_10%2C_2008 Physics meetings]). − More physics: Joshua Minor created a wiki page discussing a file+ − format for 2D physics scenes+ − ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_File_Format Physics File Format]).+ − 13. Misc.: Tomeu Vizoso worked on stabilizing the development builds+ − and helping David Van Assche who has volunteered to package Google − Gears for OLPC. This work has exposed some issues in Browse that, once − fixed, will allow the installation of several Firefox extensions. − Riccardo Lucchese, an intern at OLPC, will work on Browse performance+ − during the next months; Riccardo has been doing some Sugar profiling:+ − wget http://www.bodhidharma.info/out.grapher.svg − Daniel Drake+ − released Record-55 for compatibility with the newer GStreamer − libraries present in Joyride/8.2. − === Sugar Labs ===+ + + + + + + + + + + − 14. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM+ − from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see − [[:Image:2008-July-05-11-som.jpg]]). The − discussion seems to have drifted back towards the topic of learning. − Gary has moved all the SOM content to it's own community wiki page: [[Community/SOM]].+ − He has also uploaded the Sugar month by month SOMs as well, the direct link is: [[Community/SOM#Sugar_Mailing_List]].+ − 15. Blogged: I'll be posting these digests in [http://walterbender.org/?p=1 blog form] starting this week.+
no edit summary
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.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An '''archive''' of this digest is available '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]]'''.
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.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An '''archive''' of this digest is available '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]]'''.
=== Sugar Digest ===
=== Sugar Digest ===
1. Sugar Labs governance: There are still a few more loose ends to
1. Oversight: We had a meeting of the acting oversight board (minutes are available [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_July_18_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29|here]]).
[[Sugar Labs/Governance|governance page]]. Please comment.
2. Leaning: There were some interesting discussions about learning on
2. Infrastructure: Ivan Krstić and Bernie Innocenti have been moving the Sugar Labs back-end infrastructure to a new server hosted at MIT. Please report any problems you may have encountered post-move (One artifact to note: its.an.education.project@tema.lo-res.org '''will not work'''. It will bounce e-mails. Please change your address book to iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org).
the Education list this week:
3. OLPC in the field: Jim Gettys has published an aggregate summary of
3. "Follow Through": Chris Leonard has created a wiki page ([[EducationTeam/Lesson Plan resources]]) to aggregate collections of lesson plans or curriculum development materials "posted in some dusty corners of the Internet"; they provide potentially useful modules of curricular content (constructionist and instructionist) that can either be adapted or at least serve as examples. Please contribute to the list with your own ideas and feedback on the postings.
the world ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-July/000134.html OLPC News]).
Another useful exercise would be to enhance these lesson plans through consideration of everything Sugar has to offer: journaling, collaboration, etc. A few detailed guides would go a long way towards opening the door to others, regardless of where the learning goals come from, generative or handed down from above.
4. From Blog of Project Ceibal: More resources for teachers and learners:
* [http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-june-th-27th-we-launched-book-ceibal.html on-june-th-27th-we-launched-book-ceibal.html]
* [http://www.ceibal.edu.uy/gobiernoelectronico/pdf_libro/Libro_CEIBAL_en_la_sociedad_del_siglo_XXI.pdf Libro_CEIBAL_en_la_sociedad_del_siglo_XXI.pdf]
* [http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/uploads/193/Libro_Completo.pdf Libro_Completo.pdf]
The communities deploying Sugar are beginning to make their materials and learning publicly available. I look forward to seeing some of the wonderful materials created by the team at Inttelmex made public soon.
5. Help wanted: OLPC has a posted job opening for a Sugar UI coder (Please see [http://laptop.org/en/jobs.shtml#User%20Interface%20Developer%20for%20Sugar User Interface Developer for Sugar]). There is also interest expressed by numerous parties for help porting Sugar to a number of different Linux-based platforms. Please contact me (walter AT sugarlabs.org) if you have an interest in such work.
=== Community jams and meetups ===
=== Community jams and meetups ===
6. Teacher Jam Chicago: July 29, 2008 @ Google Chicago
7. Especially for teachers Uruguayans: A round table and conference of the "Regional Forum Ceibal learn from Digital Content educational and Intelligence" will be held in Montevideo on July 23—25 and will be transmitted live on Gateway Ceibal.
===Tech Talk===
===Tech Talk===
8. Ubuntu refresh: James Munro, with hep from Morgan Collett, has created a fresh set of Ubuntu Sucrose packages (Please see [http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/blogs/jmunro/2008/07/18/day-15-sugar-packages-done/ Sugar packages]).
With some help from Marco Pesenti Gritti, I've been trying to get my xsession configured on Ubuntu to run from the Joyride build in my home directory (sugar-jhbuild) instead of the build installed from "apt-get sugar". Not quite working due to some pathname scrambling—hopefully I'll be able to post instructions soon.
9. Browse: Simon Schampijer released a new xulrunner rpm (xulrunner-1.9-1.olpc3.2) that brings back Sugar- and OLPC-specific patches (e.g., permission patch to work with Bitfrost, no-native theme patch) that were lost when updating to the latest tarball. The layout on many sites were broken without these patches. It is available in Joyride >= 2155. Tomeu Vizoso solved the remaining issues that prevented Google Gears from running on the Browse activity.
10. SocialCalc: Work continues on the spreadsheet; a mailing list has been created to explore the use of spreadsheets in education and rural community development (Please subscribe at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/socialcalc).
11. Geography: A team of students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have just finished developing a world-geography game (Please see [http://code.google.com/p/rpiolpcs08/ RPI Geography]). Gabriel Eirea is working on "Conozco Uruguay", an Uruguayan geography educational game. (There are also several GCompris geography games available, thanks to Bruno Coudoin; please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GCompris GCompris Geography])
([[ReleaseTeam/CurrentRelease/Sucrose]]). You
12. SMS: Ankur Verma has built an SMS Gateway that can be accessed by XO through web browser, enabling one to send and receive SMS messages from within Sugar (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SMS).
13. Physics: Brian Jordan worked on fleshing out OLPC Physics portal page (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics). He continues to work on the physics activity, having collected advice from teachers and testers, including feedback from the OLPC-Sur list (many of whom are teachers using OLPC in Peru and Uruguay). Bobby Powers continued to work on his system-dynamics activity (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Model and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Model/Mockups).
([[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.4#Instructions to test in olpc joyride]]).
14. Play Go: Andrés Ambrois has been working on the PlayGo activity; he has made some patches and done some general cleaning up of the code. He is going to tackle collaboration next (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PlayGo).
[http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar/sugar-0.81.6.tar.bz2 Sugar-081.6.tar.bz2]
15. Food Force: Manusheel Gupta reports progress on the Food Force game (Please see [http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/ food force]).
* The artwork better fits with the text display;
* A messaging system has been developed, making it a more interactive experience.
----
16. Sugar control panel: Simon added documentation for the graphical control panel (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Control_Panel#The_graphical_user_interface Sugar Control Panel GUI]) and fixed related control-panel bugs, such as [http://dev.laptop.org/tivcket/7510 Ticket #7510].
17. Speech synthesis: Hemant Goyals's Google Summer of Code project, "Integration of Speech Synthesis in Sugar Environment", is making great progress, acroding to Simon, the project supervisor. You can follow the progress at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Hemant_goyal.
18. Creative Commons: The addition of a Creative Commons (CC) licensing functionality in the Journal was discussed at this week's Sugar developers meeting (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Creative_commons_licensing_functionality_in_the_journal|Creative Commons licensing functionality in the Journal).
([http://olpc.dailymotion.com./us Dailymotion]).
# Eben Eliason will make mock-up by August 15 ([http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7551 Ticket 7551]);
# Asheesh Laroia will then port the existing interface to incorporate Eben's mockup;
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac).
# after code review, the CC feature will be included
19. Collaboration: Morgan Collett tested a fix for blocker [http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7444 Ticket #7444] ("cannot close a shared activity when the initiator has disconnected"). Elliot Fairweather work on the BuddyInfo interface for
telepathy-synapse; he has Cerebro/Synapse enabled buddies appearing in the mesh view (Please see [http://people.collabora.co.uk/~elliot/synapse_buddy.png synapse_buddy.png]). Guillaume Desmottes made some improvements on "Gadget" integration into Sugar (Gadget is an XMPP server component being developed to scale Jabber-server-based collaborative activities). The presence-service is now able to properly manage buddies and activities from gadget views and update them according Gadget events.
(Please see [http://www.socialtext.net/socialcalcxo/index.cgi?sweet_socialcalc SocialCalc] and
20. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta is testing a new language-pack generation system. New features include:
* Support for activity.linfo files, which will support the translation of the names of activities;
* Support for rollback and uninstallation of individual language packs;
* Support for branches, which will enable support for the various branches within Joyride, e.g., 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and eventually, 9.1.x
21. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar continues his work on the Sugar developer documentation. He has some sample code and instructions on using Pango to render fonts in your Sugar activities as well as an updated set of steps to internationalize your activity (based on the instructions at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Internationalization_in_Sugar Internationalization in Sugar]) and his own experience getting text to translate (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac Sugar Almanac]).
22. Tinderbox: Edward Cherlin contacted Luke Crawford, who runs a colocation center in California; Luke has offered Sugar Labs Xen virtual machines for use as tinderboxes. The first test machine, running CentOS, is at sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com. Luke is building a Fedora 9 image for us, which should be ready some time this week. Depending on our needs and his excess capacity, it will be possible to
add more machines. Marco offered to take the lead on setting up the tinderboxes.
23. Activity updates: Eben Eliason has been working on tickets relevant to the pending 8.2 release, including new mockups for a software update system. Eben has been leading the discussion about activity versioning, which will probably not be resolved until release 9.1 Tomeu Vizoso added the ability to delete activities from the Home View. C. Scott Ananian worked an activity update control panel ([http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4951 Ticket #4951]) inspired by OLPC Austria's XO-get activity and Bert Freudenberg's script. Scott requests that activity authors consider adding "update_url" fields to their activity.info files (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles). Brian Jordan wrote a script for pulling activities from git repositories and creating symlinks to them from the Activities folder; this enables you to "git pull" the newest version of an activity from a repository directly in a running Sugar environment (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_co-op Activity Coop]).
24. Developer meetings: Upcoming meetings will have a fixed set of points that are discussed each meeting; additional topics that can be added by the attendees (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#The_Meeting_itself|The meeting itself]]).
* updates from the past week (e.g. process changes);
* Sugar roadmap;
* review of the latest bugs (for which we need help);
* introduction of new developers
Additional topics can be added by the developers during the week (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics|How to add topics]]). Those of you on the Sugar mailing list should expect to receive three meeting-related messages each week:
* Monday: reminder to add_topics
* Thursday: meeting reminder
* Thursday: minutes from the meeting
25. Release process: Marco Pesenti Gritti, back from vacation, has been spending time thinking about the interaction of the OLPC and Sugar Labs release processes; progress is being made, but there is more work to do. We'd like to get this right, as it will only get more complicated as we are working with more vendors and more distributions.
26. 8.2.0 bug fixing: Marco has been busy triaging and diagnosing tickets and reviewing patches for the upcoming 8.2.0 release. (One collection of bugs he dispatched were related to problems with the zoom-level logic in Joyride.)
=== Sugar Labs ===
27. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-July-12-18-som.jpg]]). A prominent theme is mathematics education.
==Sugar in the news==
==Sugar in the news==