Archive/Current Events/2008-11-17

Sugar Digest

1. Herramientas pedagógicas: Both Carla Gomez Monroy and María del Pilar Sáenz have drawn attention to the efforts of Telmex to prepare—and share—pedagogical materials for one-to-one computer and the use of Sugar. There is a wiki overflowing with guides, manuals, and lesson plans (See Herramientas Pedagógicas). This is a great addition to the growing body of materials for teachers, parents, and children. It complements materials being prepared in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal, et al. Please link additional materials to the growing list on the deployment page in the wiki (Deployment Guides and Sugar Manuals).

2. El Aula Telmex: Another public resource being sponsored by Telmex is Classroom Telmex (El Aula Telmex). This site is not Sugar specific, but as it grows it may too be an interesting resource for curricular and extracurricular activities.

3. Scratch Scratch?: Bill Kerr started a discussion thread about a change in the Scratch license (See Scratch license and Scratch Forum). The gist of the thread is that the right to modify Scratch has been removed from the license. We eagerly await clarification the Scratch team.

4. Making a Squeak: Meanwhile, the Squeak/Etoys team continues to wrestle with various up-steam distribution managers regarding inclusion "main". Squeak (which also underlies Scratch) and Etoys are free software, but it seems that there remains some confusion up stream regarding accessing and modifying the source of a "loose and late binding process". I am sure we will manage to work through these issues in order to ensure ready access to a great learning environment.

5. SVG: Bill has written a nice tutorial on using SVG in the classroom (See "Inspired by SVG"). Meanwhile, I've just about finished the conversion of Turtle Art to SVG: I am hoping an SVG rebase will make it easier to maintain, localize, and modify.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

6. SugarCamp: While not all of the details are in place, we will be holding a Sugar Camp in Cambridge the week of 17 November. We've reserved a room at the Cambridge Innovation Center—courtesy of Open Learning Exchange (OLE) beginning at noon (EST). The tentative schedule is to hold a Sugar sprint Monday and Tuesday, followed by lightening talks about new features beginning on Wednesday. A Sugar planning meeting will be held at the end of the week. See SugarCamp for details as they are finalized.

Tech Talk

7. Network Manager: Simon Schampijer kept on working on the integration of NM 0.7 in sugar. He finished loading and saving of the connections, we still use the old profile format but will later probably switch to use gconf and gnme-keyring and the WPA part. He is preparing patches now for review and will keep on working on the open issues like the Frame device and auto-connection to saved connections on startup.

8. Activities: Marco Pesenti Gritti started looking into activity startup performance. From his initial measurements, it looks as if lazy import could make a difference as it seems that we are doing more syncing than importing of modules at startup. Marco also suspects that the launcher animation is slowing things down a lot.

Marco also spent time discussing (with Gary Martin, Greg Dekoenigsberg, and Eduardo Silva) how to better handle activity upstream releases.

9. Testing meeting: Mel Chua organized a "great" testing meeting. The Testing Team section of the wiki is starting to come into focus.

10. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser has made a new version of the XO-LiveCD. You can download it from: XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch, Build 767. The CD contains many activities, including all of the "G1G1" bundle. Further information is available in the PDF document: XO-LiveCD_081106.pdf.

Sugar Labs

11. Reorg: Tomeu Vizoso is now our Joyride master, while Simon continues to lead the release team.

12. wiki.suagrlabs.org: Greg and David Farning have been making great strides on Sugar Labs teams and the wiki. Greg had some suggestions for better organizing the teams that have had immediate impact and resulted in a great deal of follow-up. David has done some major cleaning up of the wiki (as reflected in the new sidebar organization). Hopefully it is easier to navigate, easier to find the information you seek, and more obvious where and how to contribute.

13. 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-November-1-7-som.jpg).