Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 15:44, 13 June 2011

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

“What we need are notions, not notations.” —Gauss

1. I gather that I am the only one who had never read the "Mathematician's Lament", but in case you haven't read it in a while and need a refresher on "notions" instead of "notations", see [1].

It is also always worth rereading Marvin Minksy's essays on learning math: [2]

2. One of the pleasures of working in the Sugar community is that you get thoughtful feedback on your work from a wide range of people. Last week I got a request from a teacher in Uruguay for some new features in Turtle Blocks. (I included one—coordinate grid marked in centimeters—in Version 109. I also got feedback from Alan Kay and Barry Newell about the merits of the inclusion of an Arc block, which motivated me to finally write a Sugar Activity based on Barry's book, Turtle Confusion: Logo Puzzles and Riddles. Check out [3]. Also, at this weekend's Design Team meeting, I got very helpful feedback from Sascha Silbe, Gary Martin, and Manuel Quiñones regarding the enhancements I have been proposing to View Source (See Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements). Perhaps the most significant change is that I now put a copy of the cloned activity bundle into the Journal, thus maintaining equal status for the clone within the Sugar infrastructure. You can find the current patches here [4] and here [5].

In the community

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23).

4. The TedxKids@Brussels talks are online at [youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA14C60FA101D1F4C].

Tech Talk

5. Peter Robinson is very close to releasing Sugar on a Stick Version 5. Please help us test: http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-x86_64.iso and http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-i686.iso

6. I cooked up a patch to the Edit Activity—Sugar's plain-text editor—to enable editing files from outside of the Journal. I am waiting for Nate Theis, Edit maintainer, to accept the patches, but if you want to play with it, see my clone on Gitorious [6].

7. Martin Abente has implemented multiple-object select for the Sugar Journal. His patches are not quite ready for release—there is a performance-related issue with unnecessary list regeneration that Martin is working on, but having tried it, even in its current form, it is really nice.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2011 June 4th–10th (80 emails)

Visit our planet [7] 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

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 Brussels last week to attend [http://www.tedxkids.be/ TedxKids@Brussels]. I have to admit that I was not very anxious to make yet another trip across the Atlantic Ocean, but I had made a commitment to run a workshop for roughly 50 ten-year-old children, whose parents would be attending the Tedx lectures. (My former colleague at MIT, Dan Ariely has done some nice studies on “time discounting” that explain why is it easy to make such commitments far in advance while dreading them when the actual event is just around the corner.)
+“What we need are notions, not notations.” —Gauss
-While I was not at all surprised that I would enjoy working with the children—we spent an intense 45 minutes exploring Turtle Blocks—I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the program overall. One speaker after another demonstrated some tangible aspect of Constructionist learning (although few actually referred to Papert et al.). The children built sensors, did 3-D printing, build robots, programmed, wrote music, and generally had a blast.
+. I gather that I am the only one who had never read the "Mathematician's Lament", but in case you haven't read it in a while and need a refresher on "notions" instead of "notations", see [http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf].
-Here are a couple of examples of what the kids did:
+It is also always worth rereading Marvin Minksy's essays on learning math: [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minsky_essays]
-<gallery>
-File:TB-Brussels-1.png|TedxKids
-File:TB-Brussels-2.png|TedxKids
-</gallery>
-While I was impressed by how far the children got in such a short time, I continue to struggle with how to make the experience of debugging paramount. Too often I have seen children using graphical programming environments just pushing around blocks in a rote manner to achieve some visual effect but with little understanding of how things work such that they can make systemic changes.
-I was inspired to write a simple Turtle Blocks example that incorporates sensor input in a way that requires little if any calibration, hence it is readily accessible to newbie programmers and gives them lots of places in the code in which they can make meaningful interventions.
-<pre>
-[[0, ["start", 2.0], 766, 0, [null, 1]],
-[1, "forever", 766, 42, [0, 26, null]],
-[2, "repeat", 827, 270, [9, 3, 24, null]],
-[3, ["number", 80], 877, 270, [2, null]],
-[4, ["vspace", 0], 891, 456, [20, 5]],
-[5, "forward", 891, 498, [4, 8, 6]],
-[6, "right", 891, 540, [5, 7, 11]],
-[7, ["number", 91], 949, 540, [6, null]],
-[8, "box1", 961, 498, [5, null]],
-[9, "storeinbox1", 827, 228, [21, 10, 2]],
-[10, ["number", 10], 945, 228, [9, null]],
-[11, "storeinbox1", 891, 582, [6, 14, null]],
-[12, ["number", 10], 1063, 624, [14, null]],
-[13, "box1", 1063, 582, [14, null]],
-[14, ["plus2", 0], 1009, 582, [11, 13, 12]],
-[15, ["division2", 0], 996, 414, [20, 19, 18]],
-[16, "setcolor", 891, 372, [24, 17, 20]],
-[17, "heading", 969, 372, [16, null]],
-[18, ["number", 100], 1074, 456, [15, null]],
-[19, "volume", 1050, 414, [15, null]],
-[20, "setpensize", 891, 414, [16, 15, 4]],
-[21, ["fillscreen", 0], 827, 144, [26, 22, 23, 9]],
-[22, ["number", 60], 913, 144, [21, null]],
-[23, ["number", 80], 913, 186, [21, null]],
-[24, "wait", 891, 330, [2, 25, 16]],
-[25, ["number", 0.25], 949, 330, [24, null]],
-[26, ["setxy2", 0], 827, 60, [1, 27, 28, 21]],
-[27, ["number", 0], 885, 60, [26, null]],
-[28, ["number", 0], 885, 102, [26, null]]]
-</pre>
-I also wrote [http://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/mainline/blobs/master/samples/scratch.ta a simple sample program] (including in Turtle Blocks Version 108) that emulates some basic Scratch functionality in Turtle Blocks: animating a character sprite across a background image. The idea is to reveal the underlying mechanics of a typical Scratch experience. My hope is that it will make less opaque some of the black-box-like operators so popular in Scratch. I still struggle with the question of how to entice teachers and students to embrace programming through simple modifications to the programs they are using, which brings me to the next topic.
+. One of the pleasures of working in the Sugar community is that you get thoughtful feedback on your work from a wide range of people. Last week I got a request from a teacher in Uruguay for some new features in Turtle Blocks. (I included one—coordinate grid marked in centimeters—in Version 109. I also got feedback from Alan Kay and Barry Newell about the merits of the inclusion of an Arc block, which motivated me to finally write a Sugar Activity based on Barry's book, ''Turtle Confusion: Logo Puzzles and Riddles''. Check out [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4450]. Also, at this weekend's Design Team meeting, I got very helpful feedback from Sascha Silbe, Gary Martin, and Manuel Quiñones regarding the enhancements I have been proposing to View Source (See [[Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements]]). Perhaps the most significant change is that I now put a copy of the cloned activity bundle into the Journal, thus maintaining equal status for the clone within the Sugar infrastructure. You can find the current patches here [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/031838.html] and here [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/031702.html].
-. I cleaned up my patches to the [[Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements|Sugar View-source mechanism]]: (1) Sugar platform source code can be viewed through the same mechanism as Sugar activity code; and (2) the source code can be copied to create an end-user modifiable version of any Sugar activity.
+=== In the community ===
-The Sugar source code simply appears along side the activity source code, under a second radio button on the View Source toolbar.
+. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See
+http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23).
-The copy function is invoked through a secondary menu available under the activity radio button on the View Source toolbar.
+. The TedxKids@Brussels talks are online at [youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA14C60FA101D1F4C].
-At the suggestion of Ana Cichero and with help from Manuel Quiñones I modify the icon of the local copy of an activity so that it is readily apparent which version is the one to be modified by the end user.
+=== Tech Talk ===
-I am still a bit up in the air regarding how to best enable the actual modifications. I am considering adding a file chooser to the Edit activity in order to facilitate writeable access to the source directly from Sugar (without having to open the Terminal activity).
+. Peter Robinson is very close to releasing Sugar on a Stick Version 5. Please help us test: http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-x86_64.iso and http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-i686.iso
-My bigger conundrum is in regard to modifying the Sugar platform source. While it is as easy to modify as activity code, the consequences of making a mistake can be dire: Sugar could break in ways that prevent it from launching. One idea I am toying with is adding a prompt on start up to select which version of Sugar to run (from the system or from $HOME). Note: I'd only issue the prompt if a copy of Sugar was found in $HOME.
+. I cooked up a patch to the Edit Activity—Sugar's plain-text editor—to enable editing files from outside of the Journal. I am waiting for Nate Theis, Edit maintainer, to accept the patches, but if you want to play with it, see my clone on Gitorious [http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/edit-activity/walters-edit-activity].
-Try out my patches, which were sent to the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/031693.html sugar-devel list]. Further feedback would be appreciated.
+. Martin Abente has implemented multiple-object select for the Sugar Journal. His patches are not quite ready for release—there is a performance-related issue with unnecessary list regeneration that Martin is working on, but having tried it, even in its current form, it is really nice.
 === Sugar Labs ===
@@ Line 73: / Line 34: @@
 <gallery>
-File:2011-May-28-Jun-3-som.jpg|2011 May 28th–June 3th (57 emails)
+File:2011-Jun-4-10-som.jpg|2011 June 4th–10th (80 emails)
-File:2011-May-21-27-som.jpg|2011 May 21th–27th (34 emails)
 </gallery>