Sugar Labs

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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 [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)
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 [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)


== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==


1. I have been struggling with my end-of-the-year summary; I have
1. While shovelling snow I have been reflecting on Sugar – a lot of
always been more interested in looking forward than looking
snow, hence a lot of reflecting. Looking back, I came across a
backward. Nonetheless:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094695.stm quote] from 2007:
"change equals risk". At the time, I was speaking out against
incremental change to a global educational system that was failing to
meet the needs of our children. The ''status quo'' was failing – and is
still failing – and we embarked upon a path to do something about
it. We developed a deployable model of one-to-one computing enabling
us to advocate for a pedagogy of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_%28learning_theory%29
constructionist learning], where "learning can happen most effectively
when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real
world."


The numbers tell some of the story of 2010: we have almost 2 million
Over the course of four years, we've put Sugar into the hands of
users, including 100% of the children of Uruguay; we had almost
almost two-million children. Our goal has been to give them a
5 million downloads from our Activity portal; we released Sugar
"learning platform" – one that encourages them to be expressive with
versions 0.88 and 0.90. The most telling number is 12, the
knowledge, to collaborate, and to reflect.
age of our youngest contributor.


As Sugar matures, we are entering a new phase, where more of the
While we have had impact in the formal setting of the classroom, with
activity is in the hands of our user community. While we debated how
Sugar, there is an opportunity for using Sugar in an informal setting
best to get teachers engaged, the teachers themselves have started
as well, where, unconstrained by the "official" curriculum, the
reaching out to each other and to us. While we debated how best to
learner has more of an opportunity to dig more deeply into areas of
mesh our development cycle with the needs of OLPC and the distros, the
personal interest. In Caacupé, for example, there has been extensive
deployments put together their own builds, meeting their own needs.
use of Saturday learning clubs. In Rwanda, informal time for the
computer is being allocated at the end of the school day.


As with any project, we have had some churn. Tomeu Vizoso and
We have not been advocating anything goes; nor have we been anti
Sebastian Dziallas have moved on to other projects; others are
teacher. Rather, we have been encouraging "guided discovery", where
increasing their engagement: Marco Pesenti Gritti is back. Simon
the teacher has an active role in steering the learners towards
Schampijer and Sascha Silbe are taking over responsibility for
"powerful ideas" and engaging the learners in reflection and a
Glucose; Peter Robinson is the new Sugar-on-a-Stick lead; Tom Gilliard
critical dialogue about their work. Sugar facilitates this dialogue by
is advancing our efforts around virtual machine support. We have a
providing tools, e.g., the Journal, in support of reflection.
renewed engagement with the OLPC association in Miami, a group
dedicated to the original vision of the project. Activity Central and
Seeta are among the commercial enterprises offering Sugar support. We
have some prolific new activity developers, notably ChristoferR and
Mulawa. I would be remiss in not mentioning the on-going contributions
of Aleksey Lim, who is touching every corner of the project. The Sur
community has increased its activity and presence in the global
community. We have a board member from the South, weekly debates on
pedagogy in Spanish, led by Claudia Urrea, keeping us focused on our
mission. Meanwhile, Gary Martin has taken on the bulk of the design
burden. We'd be no where without the time spent by Daniel Drake and
Bernie Innocenti efforts at deployments. And Bernie and Dogi keep our
infrastructure running. Of course, there are literally 1000s of others
contributing to Sugar development and Sugar deployments. Your efforts
are making a difference.


Other 2010 events of note:
Our interventions are guided with a goal in mind –
[http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/06/allocation-vs-markets-ancient-struggle.html
the empowerment of individual competitive and cooperative
opportunity].


The first Sugar twins: The Sugar community just got larger: Pablo
:"It would take wit, insight and incredible perspective for many of
Flores and Micaela Acosta had twins, Nacieron Facundo and Sasha, born
them to pull back and admit: "Wait... I am prescribing the very thing
on 27 December.
I should hate. What I really ought to want are genuinely liberal
markets, in which the state ensures that all players get to know and
negotiate and play the great creative game from a level playing
field. Yes, that will mean some "allocating" to raise up poor children
to be ABLE to compete well. And yes we must allocate to take into
account the needs of generations yet to come. But the thing I am
devoted to is not allocation, ''per se''! The thing I am dedicated to is
giving all people (including those yet to come) a fair chance to
play." —David Brin


The first Sugar couple: Sebastian Silva and Laura Vargas met as
A theme I have taken up repeatedly since we started Sugar Labs is
volunteers and were married this fall.
sustainability. We have not been interested in resilience in the usual
sense of trying to sustain the ''status quo''. Rather, we are trying to
give children the capacity to grow and adapt so that they can thrive
in a changing and challenging world.


I'll do the "leadership thing" and blog about ‘Here’s what we’re going
Looking forward in 2011, we have any number of technical challenges:
to do. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s why we’re going to do
Python introspection, GNOME 3.0, etc. in order to advance the utility,
it.’ some time in January. Meanwhile, thank you for the great effort
stability, and maintainability of our product. A recent GNOME camp
and great accomplishments of 2010.
attended by Simon Schampijer and Tomeu Vizoso suggest that these are
achievable goals. We have some refactoring to do in order to better
support accessibility. Lots of minor patches in service of deployments
are being submitted by the Dextrose team (a combined effort of some of
our deployments, community members, and Activity Central employees. We
have several efforts to revitalize the Sugar-on-a-Stick and Virtual
Sugar projects, as accessibility to Sugar remains our biggest
technical challenge. (Indeed, a recent marketing survey conducted by a
team of Sloan students suggested that while 90% of those surveyed
recommend Sugar to others, only 33% of those who then try to download
Sugar are successful.)
 
Meanwhile, we continue to debate core issues regarding Sugar as it
relates not just to usability, but also to how Sugar impacts
learning. Towards that goal, we face social and organizational
challenges: working with deployments; working with teachers; working
with end users. Claudia Urea's weekly learning chat has been a model
that I hope we can scale up in coming months. Pablo Flores is also
working on various models of community outreach.
 
Sugar is as much a service as a product. As a community we have not
put as much effort into that aspect of our offering. I am hopeful that
a large portion of our services will be offered by our growing number
of local labs. But we need to ensure adequate support for those
efforts.
 
2. A few weeks ago I was at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The
small, inexpensive, connected device was ubiquitous. We have to think
about what role these devices may play in learning and if or how Sugar
(or some derivative of Sugar) will be part of the mix, i.e., are there
aspects of Sugar that we should be exporting into the context of
Android? Perhaps the biggest challenge is how to bring the spirit of
appropriation to these platforms which are first and foremost tools of
consumption.
 
=== Help wanted ===
 
3. Chris Leonard is looking for help with translations. "Just about
every language (besides Spanish) has some strings that need work.
Please consider volunteering some time and effort to improve the
localization in your favorite language.  Recruiting new localizers is
also a very valuable contribution." See
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/
 
=== In the community ===
 
4. We are in the process of rethinking our wesite design and also the
collection of tools we use for communicating with the Sugar
community. Please add your suggestions to
[[Blogs#Possible_tools_for_a_new_community_site|possible tools for sa
new community site.]]
 
5. The [http://www.federacionciclistauruguaya.com.uy/ Tour of Uruguay]
will be taking place in late March. The Sugar Labs-affiliated
[http://www.slipstreamsports.com/ cycling team] will be one of the
teams participating. We should do something
with the community involving the physics of cycling (e.g.,
[[Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors#Bicycle_trip_computer|odometer]])
and maps (e.g., get every child to  
document the part of the race that goes through their town or village)
and whatever other ideas people have.
 
=== Tech Talk ===
 
6. I've been tardy in acknowledging the release of os860 from OLPC. It
is the latest "official" release for the XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. The
release is based on Fedora 11 and contains the latest Sugar 0.84
(including many backported patches from more recent Sugar releases)
and the GNOME desktop. See
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3 release notes].
 
Many thanks to everyone Simon Schampijer, Martin Langhoff, and the
OLPC Association team, who led a group of testers, translators,
documenters, developers and others!!
 
A few selected highlights (from Simon's release notes):
 
* We have significantly improved collaboration when XO-1.5 is used
with no Access Points available ("under a tree"). The Neighborhood
View now shows three default Ad-hoc networks (for channels 1, 6, and
11) in user-friendly icons, and XOs will auto-connect without user
intervention. This behavior is similar to the "mesh" behavior on
XO-1.
 
* You may now share Journal entries with another learner using a USB
drive or SD card. The user experience is: Martin wants to give a
picture he has been drawing to Simon. He plugs in his USB drive and
copies the Journal entry on the drive. Simon plugs in Martin's drive
in his laptop. The entry will be shown with Martin's XO color on the
drive. Simon copies Martin's entry into his Journal.
 
* We have added support for USB2VGA adapters. You can now connect an
XO to a projector over a USB2VGA adapter and project what is on your
XO screen onto a screen or for many people to see.
 
* In this build certain activities are protected from being deleted by
accident. In the activity list in the home view the erase option is
disabled for those. Protected activities are: Browse, Terminal, Log,
Write, ImageViewer and Record. Nte that the user can still install
newer versions of these activities.
 
7. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has been making steady progress on Sugar
images for use in virtual machines. In particular, he is getting much
better (more stable and consistent) results on MAC hardware. See
[[Emulator_image_files#Other_virtual_machines|other virtual
machines]].


===Sugar Labs===
===Sugar Labs===
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<gallery>
<gallery>
File:2010-Dec-24-Jan-01-som.jpg|2010 Dec 24th-Jan 1st (37 emails)  
File:2011-Jan-22-28-som.jpg|2011 Jan 22nd-28th (43 emails)
File:2010-Dec-18-24-som.jpg|2010 Dec 18th-24th (16 emails)
File:2011-Jan-15-21-som.jpg|2011 Jan 15th-21st (46 emails)
File:2010-Dec-11-17-som.jpg|2010 Dec 11th-17th (46 emails)  
File:2011-Jan-8-14-som.jpg|2011 Jan-8th-14th (21 emails)
File:2011-Jan-1-7-som.jpg|2011 Jan 1st-7th (15 emails)
</gallery>
</gallery>


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