Summer of Code/2013

Project candidates

A list of projects potential participants might contribute within GSoC program. Every project is shortly described with mentioning secondary skills for possible participants (the primal skill is desire to do something useful).

Note

Potential mentors, please feel free to add ideas to this list. Also, feel free to add your name to a project you'd be willing to co-mentor.

Note

Potential students, more project ideas can be found on our Features page.

Write Turtle Blocks in Turtle Blocks

In support of making Sugar as transparent and fungible as possible, we'd like to make it not just Free, but provide affordances for end-user modifications. Turtle Blocks is a possible stepping stone towards that end: a programming environment approachable by children as young as five-years old. So as a first step, let's write Turtle Blocks in Turtle Blocks. From that experience, we'll hopefully know how to approach the more general Sugar problem.

Contact: User:Walter

Co-mentor:Tony Forster

Portfolio videos

Working with the maintainer of Portfolio to add a mechanism for exporting .ogv (voice over still images) of a portfolio presentation. This is a request that has come from deployments: they'd like to be able to post videos of student work, which is currently available as a slide show with audio voice-over.

A working knowlewdge of Python and some gstreamer skills are a must.

Contact: User:Walter

Co-mentor: User:Aneesh Dogra

Unified journal view

Rather than viewing the details of a Journal entry on a separate page, the idea is to make the details appear in an expandable in-line format on the main Journal view. The look and feel would be more like Google+ or Facebook. Performance will be a major challenge.

This project requires some working knowledge of the low-level Sugar Journal and datastore code.

Contact: User:Walter

Plugin support

A number of activities, notably Turtle Art, are supporting plugins -- the ability to extend features by downloading additional modules. However, the mechanism for installing plugins is anything but friendly. It would be nice to design a uniform plugin bundle type and modify the activity installer to recognize this new type. Caveats include dependencies -- presumably the plugin would take care of that -- and version control -- plugins are often incumbent upon a specific version of an activity. ASLO hosting] should also be considered.

Strong Python skills and experience with Sugar toolkit required.

Contact: User:Walter

Co-mentor: User:Aneesh Dogra

Co-mentor: User:Francis

End-user modifications of Sugar source

We have an existing mechanism for duplicating and modifying Sugar activities: a copy of the bundle can be creaed in ~/Activities, where it can be modified by the end user. We also have a mechanism for viewing the Sugar toolkit source, but no such convenient way for making changes without risking messing up the system. While it should be easy enough to make a duplicate copy in the user's home directory, and to change the Python paths to use the modified code, we need some mechanism -- presumably at boot -- to choose which version to run: the installed version or the modified version.

Strong Python skills and experience with Sugar toolkit required.

Contact: User:Walter

Project sharing website

Create a Project Hosting Site similar to the Scratch website where kids can share the projects they have created using various Sugar Activities. The site should foster collaboration and sharing of projects. The Web Site should be built using a free web framework so that it can be installed at deployment sites. Some features include:

• Ability to engage and connect with friends and classmates using various Social Networking sites/techniques.
• Ability to post projects from various Sugar Activities (ex: Turtle Blocks, Etoys, Memorize, Physics, etc.)
• Separate landing pages for different audiences (kids, teachers, parents, etc)
• Section to share kid created art from projects
• Ability for users to create galleries (of their own projects, favorite projects, subject specific topics, etc).
• Ability to have “private classroom spaces”
• Tools to support community management of the site
• Multi-language support

Contact: User:MrSteve

Co-mentor: User:dogi

Sugar as a Service website

Create a Site for managing multiple "Sugar in a Browser" sessions like treehouse or broadway gnome Some features include:

• Ability of integration of Chrome Remote Desktop
• Ability to share or to allow other user watch this session
• Ability to scale the infrastructure onto local (virtualbox}, private (kvm) and other public clouds (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_SIG, http://xvm.mit.edu/ or http://cloud.ubuntu.com/)

Contact: User:dogi

Co-mentor: User:Aneesh Dogra

Implement collaboration in Paint Activity

Paint Activity does not implement collaboration yet. The easy part is send the mouse positions and draw in the different machines, but you need have the status of the different tools used, copy/paste operations and undo/redo. Another task to do is port the graphics operations to cairo.

Requires familiarity with Python.

Contact: User:Godiard

Implement help mechanism for activities using Mallard

Mallard is a markup language that makes it easy to provide user help. It would be a nice feature to add Mallard-like help to activities, accessed through a mechanism similar to the view source mechanism. We need to sort through two issues: integration into Sugar and intergration into our i18n / L10n system.

Contact: User:Walter

Co-mentor: User:Aneesh Dogra

Co-mentor: User:Francis

IRC Activity fixes

• Activities/IRC is built around an all-Python IRC client, Urk which is no longer maintained since 2007. Thus, its better to port the activity to a newer and a better all-python IRC library.
• Activities/IRC is significantly slower than other IRC clients available on other platforms. The reason being its not multi-threaded. Thus, adding multi-threading support will be very useful.
• Activities/IRC is missing some useful features including sound on highlight (play a sound when the user is highlighted in a channel), user info (whois data) and many others. Look at some popular IRC clients running on other platforms and research about the features which can be added to Activities/IRC and how can they be added.

Requires familiarity with Python and IRC protocol specifications.

Contact: User:Aneesh Dogra

mentor: User:RafaelOrtiz

Activity Development Framework

This framework should allow to:

• Make toolbars from factories removing many lines of code.
• Start a project through typing a command.
• Doing collaboration easier to implement.
• Any other work which makes the development process hard and can be framed.

Contact: User:Francis

ASLO Enhancements

The current Activity Library is based in an old version of the Mozilla Add-ons Library.

This project is divided in three parts:

• Update the old platform and have the corresponding modifications to distribute Sugar Activities instead of Mozilla Plugins.
• Add an activity manager to the control panel. Allowing the installation/update of activities from ASLO.
• Add to the Sugar Bundle Builder a way to auto-upload activities to ASLO.

Contact: User:Francis

Chat Activity with translation

• Above ^ Example of a chat where to 2 people connected by chat could not talk to each other.

Due to language barrier

• Add a drop-down box that translates of the chat messages coming from another user.

Similar to the private/shared drop down shown.

• This could work like the #sugar / #sugar-es channels on IRC

Contact: User:Satellit

Co-mentor: User:Aneesh Dogra

Stereo data capture in Turtleart and Measure

Stereo input is supported by XO-1.5, 1.75 and 4 hardware but is disabled due to buggy software.

This is a possible project, if not too difficult.

Possible mentors

Tony Forster

Walter (if he is OK with it)