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Line 5: − + − Next up is to create a palette 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?+ − + − 2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X last week. You can read about it here: [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014837.html]+ − 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.+ − 4. 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.+ + + + + + + + − 5. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.+ − 6. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).+ − 7. The patches for [[0.96/Feature_List|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.+ Line 32:
Line 39: − + − File:2012-Jan-14-20-som.jpg|2012 Jan 14th-20th (28 emails)
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 12:54, 7 February 2012
, 12:54, 7 February 2012→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate 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]].
1. Over the weekend, there was a [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2012-February/009989.html discussion of the Yupana]--the Incan abacus--on the Sur mailing list. I was interested because when I originally wrote the [[Activities/Abacus|Abacus]] acitvity, I did some investigation into the Yupana, but was not able to find any definitive description of how it works. Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn recommended [http://www.que.es/moda/videos/yupana-calculadora-inca-metodo-ensenanza-15039.html], which was helpful. Even more helpful was [Yupana como herramienta pedagogica.pdf], recommended by Fernando Da Rosa.
So I wrote [[Activities/Yupana|Yupana]]. The beads are organized in columns, where the units (1s) column is farthest to the right; tens (10s) is second from the right; hundreds (100s) is third from the right, etc. When you click on a dot and it will reverse its state (color), and either add or substract value from that column.
[[File:Food-plugin.png|250px]]
Digging a bit deeper, I came across [http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/decodingquipumaths.htm], which had alternative interpretations of how the Yupana works. In this version, the base is 20, and rows with multiple dots are counted as 2s.
But none of these explanations were very satisfying. It seems that there is too much information in the structure that is being ignored. I came up with yet another interpretation, where the factor of each bead is based on the number of beads in its containing box, e.g., each bead in the top row, x1; in the second row, x2; in the third row, x3; and in the bottom row, x5.
John Watlington suggested yet another interpretation: x1, x2, x5, and x20.
Finally, I decided that the best thing to do is to challenge the user to come up with their own interpretion.
The [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4533 Yupana activity] is available for download from the Sugar activity portal.
The [http://git.sugarlabs.org/yupana source code] is available on the Sugar Labs Gitorious server.
2. Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez, a youthful, up-and-coming developer from Uruguay, has released a very nice graphing utility. You can download SimpleGraph from [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4534/].
=== In the community ===
=== In the community ===
3. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.
4. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).
=== Tech Talk ===
=== Tech Talk ===
5. Simon Schampijer announced the release of Sugar 0.95.4 (available from [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3-0.95.3.tar.bz2]). Many of the new features planned for Sugar 0.96 have landed in this release, including GTK-3 support. Developers should please begin testing.
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
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File:2012-Jan-21-27-som.jpg|2012 Jan 21st-27th (41 emails)
[[File:2012-Jan-28-Feb-3-som.jpg|2012 Jan 28th - Feb 3rd]] (36 emails)
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</gallery>