Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

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9. Daniel Francis has been working on [http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-virtual-env a tool] to run Sugar Build on distributions that cannot be directly supported by Sugar Build by creating a virtual Ubuntu environment and building Sugar within it. Very cool.
 
9. Daniel Francis has been working on [http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-virtual-env a tool] to run Sugar Build on distributions that cannot be directly supported by Sugar Build by creating a virtual Ubuntu environment and building Sugar within it. Very cool.
  
10. Satellit (Thomas Gilliard) reported that we have an [[image built for Raspberry PI|image built for Raspberry PI]]).
+
10. Satellit (Thomas Gilliard) reported that we have an [[Sugar_Creation_Kit/sck/Advanced_Topics#Tests_of_f17-fedora-remix.3B_Raspbian-PiscesMATE.3B_and_rasbian_debian_on_RPi|image built for Raspberry PI]]).
  
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===

Revision as of 17:59, 25 January 2013

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

There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those. --Nate Silver

1. Not to be deterred by Nate Silver's words of warning, Claudia Urrea and I continue to work on mechanisms for visualizing learning Sugar. Along with the Pacita Pena and other members of the Learning Team, we have been designing rubrics that capture the level of fluency with the technology as well as the creative use of the individual Sugar tools by children. The rubrics are captured automatically in some Sugar activities, e.g., Turtle Art and a modified version of Write. We are aiming for evaluations that look more broadly than those data that are captured by standardized tests. We just submitted a paper, "Visualizing Learning with Turtle Art", in which we present some measurements calculated from 45 Turtle Art projects [1] created by children working with Quirós Tanzi Foundation.

QTFprojects.png

We claim that the rubric serves as a partial evaluation tool for open-ended projects. Partial, because it is only a measure of how the children used Turtle Art to express themselves, but not what they made or why they made it. But the rubric does have the potential to give some assistance to the teacher who is working within the context of accountability, without adding an additional burden of analysis above and beyond looking at the work itself.

QTFscores.png

We want children not just to learn about the computer, but also to learn with the computer. Providing activities such as Turtle Art that engage them in computational thinking in the context of personal expression is necessary, but not sufficient. Giving them tools for reflection enhance the learning experience. Giving their teachers simple-to-use mechanisms for assessment increase the odds that activities like Turtle Art will find more mainstream acceptance. Making it easier to assess open-ended projects lowers one of the barriers that are preventing more use of the arts in school.

2. Google Code-In ended last week. We had 52 contestants working on almost 200 tasks supported by 22 mentors. On February 4, Google will announce the two winners from Sugar Labs. But in the meantime, I want to thank everyone who participated and thank Google for this opportunity for outreach. Chris Leonard, the co-administrator from Sugar Labs, has made Google_Code-In_2012/GCI2012_followup summarizing the accomplishments of our students. Worth checking out.

3. Sean Daly, our PR guru, is back with a vengeance. We are planning to make some noise around Google Code In, the up-coming Sugar 1.0 release, and many other accomplishments in order to broaden our community of contributors and users. Please contact Sean if you have themes we should consider promoting.

4. Belated thanks to Luke Faraone for once again doing a great job running the Sugar Labs oversight board election.

5. I just released Turtle Blocks v170. It has a number of enhancements and bug fixes with help from the usual gang: Cynthia Solomon, Tony Forster, Alan Aguiar, Jeff Elkner, and Luke Faraone. Among other changes, the color model is improved: its three-dimensional nature is exposed more consistently and the color blocks, rather than just setting hue, set hue, shade, and gray, which eliminates some confusion caused by the black and white blocks. The other major change is a change from using a .ta suffix to a .tb suffix. (.ta files will still be recognized, but .tb makes more sense for Turtle Blocks and it makes the distinction between Turtle Art and Turtle Blocks more apparent.)

I added a few more sample projects, including an ambition project (640 blocks), game-trianglepaint.ta. The inspiration comes from a simple paint program that Brian Silverman wrote in Javascript and that Lionel Laske has packaged for Sugar. The Turtle Blocks version is not really usable as a paint program, but it does work and it exposes a lot of different ideas that will hopefully inspire some up and coming young hackers.

Finally, out of the blue, yet another third party Turtle Blocks plugin has appeared. The Activities/TurtleArt#Logic was written by Roman Pollak. It adds more bitwise operations to Turtle Blocks, such as AND, OR, XOR, NOT, logical shift left, logical shift right. Nice to see that people are using the plugin mechanism. We should consider generalizing it for all activities.

In the community

5. Tincho (Martin Abente) wrote with an update on the Sugar developer course he is teaching in Asuncion. You can follow the progress at CursoSugar2013. Tincho told a "funny story" that says a lot about the Sugar community and Free Software:

Today one of my students was really impressed by this 14ish years old hacker (Ignacio from Uruguay) wanting to help him with his assignment (look at Grupo 2 assignment). He said something like "I just can't believe it, where did he came from", he just could not believe someone (a kid) from another country contacted him just to help him, out of nowhere haha...

I wrote back to let him know that Ignacio is only 13!

6. Gerald Ardito was accepted to present his work developing the Regents Living Environment curriculum into a self-directed learning experience at a Educational Media conference in British Columbia this summer.

7. I am after-dinner speaker at the 25th anniversary of the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference, a conference I used to frequent quite often, before I distracted by One Laptop per Child and Sugar. My topic will be the many ways in which human visual and electronic imaging influenced both the design of the XO and the Sugar user experience. Should be fun.

Tech Talk

8. Cool visualization of the week. Anyone want to code this up?

9. Daniel Francis has been working on a tool to run Sugar Build on distributions that cannot be directly supported by Sugar Build by creating a virtual Ubuntu environment and building Sugar within it. Very cool.

10. Satellit (Thomas Gilliard) reported that we have an image built for Raspberry PI).

Sugar Labs

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

07 Sep 2012 NDTVOne Laptop Per Child initiative a hit in rural India
08 Jul 2012 Estado de S. PauloPara educar
24 Apr 2012 Pacific StandardOLPC Redux
12 Apr 2012 Huffington PostHult Global Case Challenge: One Laptop Per Child
30 Mar 2012 newswise“Sugar on a Stick” Helps Kids Learn How to Learn
11 Jan 2012 Boston HeraldOne Laptop Per Child screening $100 tablet
10 Jan 2012 ars technicaCrank, bicycle, and waterwheel: hands-on with the OLPC XO 3.0 tablet
08 Jan 2012 The VergeOLPC XO 3.0 tablet preview: impressions, video, and pictures
07 Jan 2012 The VergeOLPC XO 3.0 tablet: an 8-inch tablet for $100, with Android and Sugar options for the children
23 Dec 2011 Miller-McCuneOne Laptop Per Child Redux
18 Oct 2011 BDURobotics in Uruguay (video)
11 Aug 2011 Berlin.deGewinner des Berliner Landeswettbewerbs zu Open Source stehen fest
25 Jul 2011 CCC ClassicGarmin-sugarlabs development cycling team at Crit starting line
25 Jul 2011 CCC ClassicGarmin-sugarlabs development cycling team after Crit
13 Apr 2011 framablogL'expérience Sugar Labs préfigure-t-elle une révolution éducative du XXIe siècle?
05 Apr 2011 BusinesswireThe Government of Peru Expands the One Laptop Per Child Program with Local Manufacturing
31 Jan 2011 SundanceA Day in the Life – Peru
01 Dec 2010 velonationSugar Labs to back Garmin-Cervelo’s development team in unique arrangement
28 Oct 2010 UCRNuevas tecnologías deben estar al alcance de todos los niños y niñas
05 Oct 2010 xconomyOne Ecosystem per Child
08 Sep 2010 FLOSS WeeklySugar Labs
09 Aug 2010 ABC digitalIndicadores constatan el impacto positivo en el aprendizaje de niños
23 Jun 2010 ABC digitalXo 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.comLa laptop une a padres, alumnos y docentes
15 Jun 2010 The HOLPC XO-1.5 software updated
10 Jun 2010 engadgetSugar on a Stick hits 3.0, teaches us about a new kind of fruit
27 May 2010 Pro Linux DESugar on a Stick v3 freigegeben (German)
27 May 2010 NY TimesOne Laptop Per Child Project Works With Marvell to Produce a $100 Tablet
27 May 2010 PC WorldOLPC Rules out Windows for XO-3
03 May 2010 WXXI: Mixed MediaInterview with Walter Bender (audio)
03 May 2010 Linux MagazineOLPC Computers for Palestinian Refugee Children
14 Apr 2010 National Science FoundationXO Laptops Inspire Learning In Birmingham, Alabama (video)
02 Apr 2010
15 Mar 2010 nbc13.comBirmingham City students opt to spend spring break in class, XO computer camps (video)
18 Feb 2010 LWNKarma targets easier creation of educational software
05 Feb 2010 iprofesionalLa PC barata de Negroponte desembarca en la Argentina para pelear contra Intel
14 Jan 2010 AALFOpen Systems for Broader Change
03 Jan 2010 Educacion 2.0PLAN CEIBAL, El Libro
14 Dec 2009 xconomySugar gets sweeter
10 Dec 2009 ars technicaSugar software environment gets sweeter with version 2
09 Dec 2009 WiredNew Sugar on a Stick Brings Much Needed Improvements
08 Dec 2009 engadgetSugar on a Stick OS goes to 2.0, gets Blueberry coating and creamy Fedora 12 center (video)
07 Dec 2009 Teleread.orgSugar 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 zanichellisoftware libero a scuola
12 Nov 2009 opensuse.orgopenSUSE 11.2 Released
07 Nov 2009 My Broadband NewsMandriva 2010 packs a punch [and Sugar]
06 Nov 2009 GhanaWebOpen education and an IT-enabled economic growth in Ghana: Musings of a dutiful citizen
26 Oct 2009 Linux Magazine ESSoftware Libre como apoyo al aprendizaje
09 Oct 2009 interdisciplinesOLPC and Sugar: mobility through the community
08 Oct 2009 IBM developerWorks10 important Linux developments everyone should know about
01 Oct 2009 OLPC FranceInterview Walter Bender au SugarCamp
25 Sep 2009 The InquirerOne Laptop per Child marches on
18 Sep 2009 GroklawThe Role of Free Software in Education
18 Sep 2009 ReutersSugar Labs and Free Software Foundation Celebrate Software Freedom Day
17 Sep 2009 ICTDev.orgDream Again with One Laptop per Child
26 Aug 2009 LatinuxAzúcar en una memoria USB
03 Aug 2009 Wired: Geek DadInventing a New Paradigm: SugarLabs and the Sugar UI
30 Jul 2009 ZanichelliSugar on a Stick: imparare insieme
23 Jul 2009 Everything USBRecycleUSB.com - Donate your Flash Drives for a Good Cause
22 Jul 2009 OLPC FranceSugar : mauvaise presse et mise au point
13 Jul 2009 Spiegel OnlineDas zuckersüße Leichtbau-Linux
07 Jul 2009 ComputerWorldUKGran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts
06 Jul 2009 Windows ForestUSB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 LibrarySugar on a Stick
27 Jun 2009 DeutschlandfunkSüßes für die Kleinen: Sugar ist Linux speziell für Kinder (in Deutsch)
26 Jun 2009 EduTechSugar on a stick, and other delectables (praise for the lowly USB drive)
26 Jun 2009 ars technicaSugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms
24 Jun 2009 BBCOLPC software to power aging PCs
24 Jun 2009 Technology Review$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
15 Jun 2009 TechSavvyKidsEpisode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
10 Jun 2009 LWN.netSugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
27 May 2009 LWN.netActivities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
27 May 2009 Business WireDailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
01 May 2009 GuysoftNokia N810 Running OLPC Sugar
29 Apr 2009 El MercurioAsí se vivió la fiesta del software libre
27 Apr 2009 ostaticSugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
25 Apr 2009 Free Software MagazineThe Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
24 Apr 2009 ars technicaFirst taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
22 Apr 2009 BetanewsBeta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
27 Mar 2009 Mass High TechGoogle promotes summer open-source internships
18 Mar 2009 MetropolisA Good Argument
16 Mar 2009 Laptop MagazineSugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market WatchSugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DCLearning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomySugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 ars technicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 ars technicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender 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 wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

See our Press Page