Jump to content

Sugar Labs/Current Events: Difference between revisions

From Sugar Labs
Line 5: Line 5:
==Sugar Digest==
==Sugar Digest==


1. One of the pleasures of working with Sugar is the interaction with educators. Over the past few weeks, I have been in a closed loop with Tony Forster, who has been developing some lesson plans and tutorial around the use of the Slide Rule activity that I had written. Not only has Tony given me feedback about bugs, he has also given me ideas about how to make the activity more useful and compelling to students. At Tony's urging, I have recently added new slides for Sin, Tangent, Log Log, and Natural Log. In the process, I did a major refactoring of the code – I am almost not embarrassed by it – and a retooling of the UI. But also, in the spirit of Sugar, I added the ability to generate custom slides and stators on the fly. (I've a bit more fine-tuning to do before I release the code, but http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/attachment/ticket/2310/Sliderule-15.xo is at least somewhat usable.)
1. Simon Schampijer (erikos) and the Release Team have made the Sucrose 0.90 tarballs available (See [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-September/027357.html 1]). The release notes are available at [[0.90/Notes]]. 0.90 represents a significant improvement over 0.88, most noteably in regard to dozens of new learning activities; support for ad hoc networks and a more stable collaboration experience; a new Home view configuration able to display more activity icons; improved filtering options in the Journal; and addition keybindings for using Sugar on non-OLPC-XO hardware. None of these changes are dramatic: our goal is steady improvement, without requiring schools to make any major changes to their current Sugar processes. Kudos to the Design, Developer, and Testing teams for all their contributions.


Not to be outdone, Tony generated a slide rule in Gamemaker. A glutton for punishment, he then made a slide rule in TurtleArt (http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2010/09/turtle-sliderule.html).
0.90 will be incorporated into the upcoming Sugar-on-a-Stick release. It undoubtedly has some bugs, so any testing you can provide would be appreciated. See...


The only thing better than Sugar is the Sugar community.
2. I've been spending way too much time in airplanes and airports of late: two trips to Europe in two weeks. I was on a review committee at KTK in Stockholm at the beginning of last week and gave a keynote at the Open World Forum in Paris at the end of this week. I head to Costa Rica to run a Sugar/OLPC workshop with Claudia Urrea next week.


2. Reminder: we will be holding our mid-term election in October in order to fill three oversight board positions. If you are not an "official" member of Sugar Labs and would like to be, please contact members AT sugarlabs DOT org. Being a member of the oversight board is a great way to be involved with the project. It is not to late to add your name to the ballot.  
The good news is that I get a lot of code written on the airplane. I have been working on some significant enhancements to Turtle Blocks, Sliderule, Abacus, and Visual Match (AKA, Dimensions).


===In the community===
Turtle Blocks v99, which will be released this week, includes reskinable turtles, which means you can use the turtle as a sprite to do animations. I also fixed up a number of small bugs, such as a problem with the upper bound of the Random block. The Set XY block now honors pen up and pen down. And most blocks that take two arguments will auto-expand to prevent overlapping. I also added locale support for the form of the decimal point when using number blocks, e.g., in German, a comma is used to designate the decimal point; in English, a period is used.
 
Sliderule v21 now supports copy/paste so that you can copy the results of your calculations to the clip board and paste numbers into the slide and reticule. It also has undergone a major refactoring with the intension of making it easier to create custom slides and to make further modifications to the code.
 
Abacus v19 also supports copy/paste and, perhaps more interesting, when you switch between different abaci, the value propogates from one to the next, so you can see how the same value is represented on different abaci with a single button click. (Thanks to Tony Forester for coming up with that feature request. Also thanks to Shanjit Singh Jajmann for adding the copy/paste toolbar.)


3. Jim Simmon's ''Make Your Own Sugar Activities!'' manual is now available en español [http://translate.flossmanuals.net/ActivitiesGuideSugar_es/Introduction].
Visual Match v26 lets you load custom card sets from the Journal. You can create cards using Paint, Turtle Art, Record, Browse, etc. (Any tool that lets you find or create images.) The only requirement is that you number your images 1 to 9, or 27, or 81, depending upon how many dimensions you are rendering.


4. There will be an OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit October 21 – 24 in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2010/].
2. Reminder: we will be holding our mid-term election this month to fill three oversight board positions. Ballots will be issued to all Sugar Labs members. We have five great candidates – Chris Ball, Adam Holt, Steven Parrish, Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez, and Gerald Ardito – who represent the breadth of the Sugar community: developers, teachers, packagers, and community outreach. No matter whom we elect, the community will be richer because of their participation.


===Tech Talk ===
===In the community===


5. Aleksey Lim has set up an IRC channel for "newbie" developers: #sugar-newbies on freenode. The channel is logged so that we can archive "newbie" questions and answers ([http://jita.sugarlabs.org/freenode/%23sugar-newbies/index.html]).
3. There will be an OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit October 21 – 24 in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2010/].


===Sugar Labs===
===Sugar Labs===
Line 28: Line 32:


<gallery>
<gallery>
File:2010-Aug-14-20-som.jpg|2010 Aug 14th-20th (18 emails)
File:2010-Sept-18-24-som.jpg|2010 Sept 18th-24th (32 emails)
File:2010-Aug-21-27-som.jpg|2010 Aug 21st-27th (32 emails)
File:2010-Sept-11-17-som.jpg|2010 Sept 11th-17th (56 emails)  
File:2010-Aug-28-Sept-3-som.jpg|2010 Aug 28th-Sept 3rd (16 emails)  
File:2010-Sept-4-10-som.jpg|2010 Sept 4th-10th (21 emails)  
</gallery>
</gallery>



Revision as of 08:10, 2 October 2010

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

1. Simon Schampijer (erikos) and the Release Team have made the Sucrose 0.90 tarballs available (See 1). The release notes are available at 0.90/Notes. 0.90 represents a significant improvement over 0.88, most noteably in regard to dozens of new learning activities; support for ad hoc networks and a more stable collaboration experience; a new Home view configuration able to display more activity icons; improved filtering options in the Journal; and addition keybindings for using Sugar on non-OLPC-XO hardware. None of these changes are dramatic: our goal is steady improvement, without requiring schools to make any major changes to their current Sugar processes. Kudos to the Design, Developer, and Testing teams for all their contributions.

0.90 will be incorporated into the upcoming Sugar-on-a-Stick release. It undoubtedly has some bugs, so any testing you can provide would be appreciated. See...

2. I've been spending way too much time in airplanes and airports of late: two trips to Europe in two weeks. I was on a review committee at KTK in Stockholm at the beginning of last week and gave a keynote at the Open World Forum in Paris at the end of this week. I head to Costa Rica to run a Sugar/OLPC workshop with Claudia Urrea next week.

The good news is that I get a lot of code written on the airplane. I have been working on some significant enhancements to Turtle Blocks, Sliderule, Abacus, and Visual Match (AKA, Dimensions).

Turtle Blocks v99, which will be released this week, includes reskinable turtles, which means you can use the turtle as a sprite to do animations. I also fixed up a number of small bugs, such as a problem with the upper bound of the Random block. The Set XY block now honors pen up and pen down. And most blocks that take two arguments will auto-expand to prevent overlapping. I also added locale support for the form of the decimal point when using number blocks, e.g., in German, a comma is used to designate the decimal point; in English, a period is used.

Sliderule v21 now supports copy/paste so that you can copy the results of your calculations to the clip board and paste numbers into the slide and reticule. It also has undergone a major refactoring with the intension of making it easier to create custom slides and to make further modifications to the code.

Abacus v19 also supports copy/paste and, perhaps more interesting, when you switch between different abaci, the value propogates from one to the next, so you can see how the same value is represented on different abaci with a single button click. (Thanks to Tony Forester for coming up with that feature request. Also thanks to Shanjit Singh Jajmann for adding the copy/paste toolbar.)

Visual Match v26 lets you load custom card sets from the Journal. You can create cards using Paint, Turtle Art, Record, Browse, etc. (Any tool that lets you find or create images.) The only requirement is that you number your images 1 to 9, or 27, or 81, depending upon how many dimensions you are rendering.

2. Reminder: we will be holding our mid-term election this month to fill three oversight board positions. Ballots will be issued to all Sugar Labs members. We have five great candidates – Chris Ball, Adam Holt, Steven Parrish, Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez, and Gerald Ardito – who represent the breadth of the Sugar community: developers, teachers, packagers, and community outreach. No matter whom we elect, the community will be richer because of their participation.

In the community

3. There will be an OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit October 21 – 24 in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [1].

Sugar Labs

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

Visit our planet 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

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
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