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Line 5: − 1. We have a newly elected Sugar Labs oversight board. Joining us are Claudia Urrea, Gonzalo Odiard, and Daniel Francis. Continuing are Adam Holt, Chris Leonard, Gerald Ardito, and Walter Bender. It is a nice group -- quite diverse -- which will bring some new perspectives to the board. Departing are Chris Ball, Aleksey Lim, and Sebastian Silva. All three will be missed: Chris's calm, thoughtful guidance, Aleksey's cool insight into the needs of developers and also the reminder that our mission is broader than just our current collection of tools, and Sebastian, who lives and breathes on the ground of Sugar deployments, and has well represented their needs. I hope that our departing members will continue to participate as non-voting contributors to our discussions and I also am very grateful for everything they have contributed in the past.+ + + − 2. Two more weeks of [http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012 Google Code In]. It has really been fun trying to keep pace with all of these new contributors to Sugar. If you have ideas for "tasks", it is not too late to add more. Please contact me or Chris Leonard.+ − 3. 2012 is coming to an end, a natural time to reflect on where we have been and where we are going.+ − From the technical perspective, Sugar 0.96 and 0.98, which include the port to GTK3 and support for touch are important milestones. The tireless work of the development team under the leadership of Simon Schampijer has really born fruit. They have guaranteed the stability of Sugar on GNU/Linux for the foreseeable future. (A tip of the hat to Martin Langhoff and OLPC Association, who generously supported Simon and much of the devel team in 2012.) Their work will be featured as the OLPC XO4 is unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early next month.+ − From the learning perspective, through the participation of Claudia and the Learning Team, we made a lot of headway on understanding how Sugar is used and how it can be used to have more impact on learning. Their work on "making learning visible" has both academic merit and practical implications for the learner.+ − From the user perspective, we continue to expand our user base, both in terms of new deployments and new platforms. In 2012, we made renewed headway in the US market, with projects in Miami, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina (sponsored by the Knight Foundation). On the other side of the globe, Barry Vercoe has launched a program in New Zealand. Meanwhile, existing programs, such as those in Nicaragua and Paraguay, continue to expand. In Argentina, while the growth of OLPC has been slow, the growth of Sugar on other platforms is steadfast. While it is difficult to track where it is being used, the number of visits to the Sugar-on-a-Stick download page is >> 600,000.+ − + − From the point of view of localization and internationalization, the highlights of 2012 are the progress we have made in Aymara and Quechua. Edgar Quispe and Irma Alvarez have done wonders. (A tip of the hat to Chris Leonard and Aymar Ccopacatty for their help and support.) Barry Vercoe has personally funded work on Maori and we have had much progress on several indigenous languages in Mexico. Meanwhile, Chris has made numerous contributions upstream, both by hosting some upstream projects on our Pootle server, but also by being a strong voice and advocate within the glibc and pootle communities.+ − More technical highlights include the work of Daniel Narvaez on sugar-build, which provides a much more stable development environment than the unwieldy sugar-jhbuild environment. Under the shepherding of Peter Robinson and Tom Gilliard, Sugar on a Stick and our virtual machine support continue to improve in quality and stability. Aleksey, Sebastian, and Laura Vargas have made contributions to enhance our ability to support off-line deployments with their work on the Sugar Network. The work by Team Butia on expanding Sugar into the sphere of robotics continues to impress me and the work of Guzman Trindad and Tony Forster, integrating Sugar into the world of rich sensing, provides endless pleasure.+ − Another highlight, seemingly innocuous, was the creation of the Amazonas page in Facebook. This simple use of social media to provide a support network for teachers in one of the most isolated places on earth has exceeded my expectations. It has three times as many members as had attended the workshop in Chachapoyas, and it has daily updates of projects, questions, and progress. The recent work by Raul Gutierrez on integrating Turtle Art with Facebook is a harbinger of how we might make sharing of the Sugar experience more seamless in 2013.+ − Personally, my biggest thrill in 2012 was working with children, in Miami and in Khairat (India). I had a chance to teach Turtle Art workshops and in both cases, the children did dance animations that were impressive in their depth.+ − So what is next? In 2013 we will see the fruit of some of our efforts, including a chance to see Sugar with touch in the field. OLPC Australia will be the first deployment of the OLPC XO4. It will be interesting to learn what impact it has in the classroom. One thing we already know is that touch makes Sugar more accessible to younger (pre-K) children. It also is congruent with the expectations of children coming of age in the tablet/smart-phone era.+ − Daniel has been working on revitalizing our automated testing suite, which will help with maintenance and QA.+ − − We will see advances in localization. Already, the Ministry of Education in Peru has opened a bid to follow up on the work of Edgar and Irma. Translation of other language groups is also being advanced. − − The topic of support for Special Needs was raised numerous times in 2012. I hope to convene the various interested parties in early 2013 to lay out a new road map for Sugar in this area. (The work on GTK3 has helped in that we now have, for example, an on-screen keyboard. And by eliminating Hippo, we have removed the last vestiges of Sugar that were preventing us from using the GNOME tools.) − Perhaps these themes will be the focus of Sugar 1.0, due to be released in Q2 2013. A few things queued up include setting a background image on the Home View (thanks to Agustin Zubiaga) and multiple Home Views (thanks to Daniel Francis).+ + + − I also expect that we will be seeing more learning guides in 2013, a harbinger of which was pulled together for the Charlotte deployment: teachers sharing best practice.+ − There are two elephants in the room: The Cloud and Android. How we face these opportunities will certainly become more clear in 2013.+ − I hope to organize a Global Sugar conference in 2013. Perhaps at MIT or perhaps at a deployment. It is time to bring our community together face to face on a larger scale.+ − Finally, in 2012, I wrote [http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356809905&sr=1-1&keywords=learning+to+change+the+world a book about the OLPC story], which includes a chapter on Sugar, but I need to write a more complete story about Sugar, its goals and its impact. I am setting that as a personal goal for 2013.+ − === In the community ===+ − 4. Rita Freudenberg announced that a new Etoys book is available: [http://wiki.squeakland.org/index.php/LearningWithEtoysI3 ''Learning with Etoys Imagine, Invent, Inspire''].+
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 18:58, 25 January 2013
, 18:58, 25 January 2013→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is
worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of
those. --Nate Silver
1. Not to be deterred by Nate Silver's words of warning, Claudia Urrea and I continue to work on mechanisms for visualizing learning Sugar. Along with the Pacita Pena and other members of the Learning Team, we have been designing rubrics that capture the level of fluency with the technology as well as the creative use of the individual Sugar tools by children. The rubrics are captured automatically in some Sugar activities, e.g., Turtle Art and a modified version of Write. We are aiming for evaluations that look more broadly than those data that are captured by standardized tests. We just submitted a paper, "Visualizing Learning with Turtle Art", in which we present some measurements calculated from 45 Turtle Art projects [1] created by children working with [http://fundacionqt.org/conectandonos.htm Quirós Tanzi Foundation].
[[File:QTFprojects.png|200px]]
We claim that the rubric serves as a partial evaluation tool for open-ended projects. Partial, because it is only a measure of how the children used Turtle Art to express themselves, but not what they made or why they made it. But the rubric does have the potential to give some assistance to the teacher who is working within the context of accountability, without adding an additional burden of analysis above and beyond looking at the work itself.
[[File:QTFscores.png|200px]]
We want children not just to learn about the computer, but also to learn with the computer. Providing activities such as Turtle Art that engage them in computational thinking in the context of personal expression is necessary, but not sufficient. Giving them tools for reflection enhance the learning experience. Giving their teachers simple-to-use mechanisms for assessment increase the odds that activities like Turtle Art will find more mainstream acceptance. Making it easier to assess open-ended projects lowers one of the barriers that are preventing more use of the arts in school.
We have also grown our developer community. Of particular note is that the next generation contributors is in large part coming from Sugar users. Daniel, Agustin, Christofer, Ignacio, Rafael, and others whom Flavio Danesse has been mentoring in Uruguay have become central to the Sugar development process. They have realized our goal of having real responsibility for learning and the tools for learning lie in the hands of the learners themselves. This is an unprecedented accomplishment for which the Sugar Community should be proud. Sugar Labs participation in Google Code-in is icing on the cake. We've got >50 new youth contributors since the contest began in November.
2. Google Code-In ended last week. We had 52 contestants working on almost 200 tasks supported by 22 mentors. On February 4, Google will announce the two winners from Sugar Labs. But in the meantime, I want to thank everyone who participated and thank Google for this opportunity for outreach. Chris Leonard, the co-administrator from Sugar Labs, has made [[a page in the wiki|Google_Code-In_2012/GCI2012_followup]] summarizing the accomplishments of our students. Worth checking out.
3. Sean Daly, our PR guru, is back with a vengeance. We are planning to make some noise around Google Code In, the up-coming Sugar 1.0 release, and many other accomplishments in order to broaden our community of contributors and users. Please contact Sean if you have themes we should consider promoting.
4. Belated thanks to Luke Faraone for once again doing a great job running the Sugar Labs oversight board election.
5. I just released [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/downloads/latest/4027/addon-4027-latest.xo Turtle Blocks v170]. It has a number of enhancements and bug fixes with help from the usual gang: Cynthia Solomon, Tony Forster, Alan Aguiar, Jeff Elkner, and Luke Faraone. Among other changes, the color model is improved: its three-dimensional nature is exposed more consistently and the color blocks, rather than just setting hue, set hue, shade, and gray, which eliminates some confusion caused by the black and white blocks. The other major change is a change from using a .ta suffix to a .tb suffix. (.ta files will still be recognized, but .tb makes more sense for Turtle Blocks and it makes the distinction between Turtle Art and Turtle Blocks more apparent.)
I added a few more sample projects, including an ambition project (640 blocks), game-trianglepaint.ta. The inspiration comes from a simple paint program that Brian Silverman wrote in Javascript and that Lionel Laske has packaged for Sugar. The Turtle Blocks version is not really usable as a paint program, but it does work and it exposes a lot of different ideas that will hopefully inspire some up and coming young hackers.
Finally, out of the blue, yet another third party Turtle Blocks plugin has appeared. The [[Logic plugin|Activities/TurtleArt#Logic]] was written by Roman Pollak. It adds more bitwise operations to Turtle Blocks, such as AND, OR, XOR, NOT, logical shift left, logical shift right. Nice to see that people are using the plugin mechanism. We should consider generalizing it for all activities.
=== In the community ===
5. Tincho (Martin Abente) wrote with an update on the Sugar developer course he is teaching in Asuncion. You can follow the progress at [[CursoSugar2013]]. Tincho told a "funny story" that says a lot about the Sugar community and Free Software:
:Today one of my students was really impressed by this 14ish years old hacker (Ignacio from Uruguay) wanting to help him with his assignment (look at Grupo 2 assignment). He said something like "I just can't believe it, where did he came from", he just could not believe someone (a kid) from another country contacted him just to help him, out of nowhere haha...
I wrote back to let him know that Ignacio is only 13!
6. Gerald Ardito was accepted to present his work developing the Regents Living Environment curriculum into a self-directed learning experience at a Educational Media conference in British Columbia this summer.
7. I am after-dinner speaker at the 25th anniversary of the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference, a conference I used to frequent quite often, before I distracted by One Laptop per Child and Sugar. My topic will be the many ways in which human visual and electronic imaging influenced both the design of the XO and the Sugar user experience. Should be fun.
=== Tech Talk ===
8. [http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/ Cool visualization of the week]. Anyone want to code this up?
9. Daniel Francis has been working on [http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-virtual-env a tool] to run Sugar Build on distributions that cannot be directly supported by Sugar Build by creating a virtual Ubuntu environment and building Sugar within it. Very cool.
10. Satellit (Thomas Gilliard) reported that we have an [[image built for Raspberry PI|image built for Raspberry PI]]).
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===