Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs/Current Events: Difference between revisions

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


1. I've spent much of the week working on Turtle Art. At the urging of Cynthia Solomon, I decided to make some visual changes to some of the blocks, in an effort to make it a bit easier to follow program flow. To that end, I changed the way the flow block works. For example, the Repeat block had an overhang to the right below which you could stack blocks that would be repeated. Once the repeating was complete, flow continued on to blocks attached to the bottom of the repeat block. I've often seen people confused by this: they have been uncertain where to attach the blocks to repeat and have had to use vertical-spacer blocks to make their programs less cluttered. In the new look, the Repeat block has a clamp (or jaws) that surround the blocks to repeat and it auto-expands, eliminating the need to use vertical-spacer blocks. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words. In addition to Repeat, there are new blocks for Forever, If-then, If-then-else, While, Until, and, from the Extras palette, the Collapse block. The latter is useful for collapsing a large stack of blocks into a single brick.
1. It has been a few weeks since I posted to the Sugar Digest. I've been buried in a few projects and only just beginning to come up for air. One distraction was that I got a request via Reuben to write a chess activity for Armenia. It was too tempting to resist, so I pulled a few all-nighters that resulted in a Sugar front-end to the gnuchess program. The program, Gnuchess, can be downloaded from [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4593] and is documented on the [[Actvities/Gnuchess]] page in the wiki. Fairly rudimentary, but for a few fun features: you can play against the robot, another person on the same computer, or over the network. You can use a generic set of pieces, load in some Sugar-colored ones, or those of your own design. When you play against someone over the net, they will see your artwork and you'll see their artwork.


[[File:New-TA-Repeat-block.png|300px]]
I also have been making a number of subtle but important changes to Turtle Blocks. Cynthia Solomon (of Logo fame) has been giving me feedback and as a result, I think the box and action naming is much more streamlined and consistent. Check out [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027 v 154] and keep an eye out for v 156, coming soon.


2. Stephen Jacobs sent a pointer to the projects his students at RIT have done this year:
Also, we hosted a learning workshop at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week at which I got some feedback on the Portfolio and Bulletin Board activities. I am in the midst of streamlining Portfolio and also enabling comments to be made over the web. (You can get a sneak preview of [[File:Portfolio-27.xo|v 27]].) I have a number of outstanding questions about classroom protocol; a team from the workshop has been meeting to discuss my questions and to make additional suggestions. Once I get the Portfolio released, I'll dive back into the Bulletin Board activity.


* [[Quilt]] is a chat system designed for mesh networks. It was written in Python and uses Zeromq as a way to pass data between nodes. Each node connects to other nodes and allows a user to chat. The end goal is to have a resilient chat network that auto discovers nodes on a mesh network.
2. At the workshop, the group organized working groups to address a number of important issues: classroom protocols, assessment, and a collaborative web presence for teachers and students. Stay tuned.


* [[PyCaveExplorer]] is designed to teach children basic electronics by having them explore randomly generated, grid-based caves. The goal is to create a lit path from the starting tile to the goal tile by placing lights, batteries, and connecting pieces of wire. The base educational goal is to teach how simple circuits work, along with the differences between series and parallel circuits, and the relationship between a power source and the number of things connected to it.
3. I got some feedback from Nicaragua about the [[Activities/Nutrition|Nutrition activity]]. More region-specific foods and a new game: match the food to its food group. A new release will be available soon; a preview is available [[File:Nutrition-6.xo|here]].


* In [[Point-and-Click-Arthur]], the player is Arthur's Royal Detective. The goal is retrieve all the knights who are in the middle of their most famous quests for a banquet at Camelot. The game is a "point and click" game in the same vein as Monkey Island and King's Quest. The user reads dialog, hunts for an item on screen, and figures out who to use the item on. This causes a reaction and new areas open, etc.
4. Aleksey Lim and the Somosazucar team continue to make progress on their "Harmonic" distribution, the goal of which is to provide a collaborative Sugar environment in the real-world context of limited network connectivity. See [[Harmonic_Distribution/1.0/Todo|the to-do list]] for a list of milestones already achieved and still to come. The team has been doing some preliminary testing in Puno.


3. I had blogged about a meeting with Teemu Leinonen from Alto University last week and had mentioned that I was working on a new activity inspired by [http://teamup.aalto.fi/ TeamUp]. The beta version of [[Activities/Bulletinboard|Bulletin Board]] is ready for testing. It is quite simple: think of it as Portfolio shared among multiple users. Starred entries in your Journal are shared, along with an audio recording.
5. Simon Schampijer and Manuel Quiñones represented Sugar Labs at GUADEC 2012, the GNOME user and developer conference. Simon gave a talk outlining our progress on the GTK-3 port (See items 6 and 7 below). I also participated, remotely, in the advisory board meeting, where I gave a more general update of the project. One theme in my presentation was internationalization. Chris Leonard, our i18n team leader, supplied me with a list of accomplishments and concerns about the state of i18n in GNOME (specifically in glibc). There was an immediate reaction from the board. I am hopefully that we'll see some of Chris's suggested adopted by the GNOME community.


4. Danishka Navin reports from Sri Lanka that next month, another remote school will be running Sugar on [http://www.hanthana.org/ Hanthana Linux].
6. Daniel Francis, a product of Plan Ceibal, has been helping with our GTK3 port. This week he ported [http://git.sugarlabs.org/~danielf/turtleart/danielfs-gtk3 Turtle Art to GTK3]. We are well on our way to getting our core activities ported thanks in large part to the efforts of our Sugaristas.


5. Meanwhile, Sameer Verma has been having some [http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/ adventures] on the sub-continent.
7. Simon posted some instructions for porting Gstreamer Activities to PYGobject and Gstreamer 1.0 to the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2012-July/038700.html Sugar developer list].
 
6. Hilaire Fernandes of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4561 DrGeo] fame shared [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrupz0_1310-programmed-sketch-rulers_tech a cool video] of some of the things you can do. Worth checking out.
 
7. Daniel Narvaez announced that he has released a new sugar-build that should make it pretty easy to build Sugar on most GNU/Linux systems (tested on the latest Fedora and Ubuntu systems).
 
git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-build/sugar-build.git
cd sugar-build
make build
make run
 
Don't forget to read the README file.
 
8. Last week Bert Freudenberg announced a [http://etoys.squeak.org/download/ release candidate] for Etoys 5.0.1. Please help with testing.
       
9. Reuben Caron announced the [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/11.3.1 final release of OLPC OS 11.3.1] for XO-1, XO-1.5 and as a formal release for XO-1.75. Details are available at [12].
 
10. Meanwhile, Daniel Drake announced another [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/12.1.0 candidate release of 12.1.0]. Please help test this build as well.


=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===


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Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.


== Community News archive ==
== Community News archive ==
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