Sugar Labs/Current Events

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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 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. I am writing this issue of the Sugar Digest while once again watching the sun rise at Logan Airport in Boston. On the road, just back from Prague and now continuing west to Los Angeles to give a talk at USC. I have an opportunity to reach out to the freshman engineering class and impress upon them the pleasures of working with Sugar Labs.

Back from Los Angeles, where I am doing my final edits. The lecture, which was not recorded, seemed to go well. Lots of questions, including, "how do I get involved?" One professor with whom I met who designs curricula interventions for STEM in elementary and middle schools remarked that Sugar/OLPC XO was the first computer that made sufficient sense to him to merit bringing into the classroom!!

2. There are many reasons to participate in Sugar Labs, but for me personally I am motivated by opportunity it gives me to build within a community of builders. Last weekend's Sugar Camp in Prague organized by Daniel Drake was exhilarating. Being back among the core Sugar developers such as Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti Presenti, along with Simon Schampijer, Raul Gutierrez Segales, Benjamin Berg, Bert and Rita Freudenberg at brmlab, the Prague hackerspace, was a rare treat. We made significant progress on migrating Sugar to GNOME 3 (Raul blogged about our daily progress here: [1]. For my part, I got a tutorial on Cairo development and gtk3 and this managed to get a few activities ported (Abacus with the help of Benjamin and Raul and Turtle Art with additional help from C Scott Ananian). We've begun documenting the porting process in the wiki. The goal is to have the next release of Sugar run in GNOME 3, which I think will be achievable.

The beer in Prague was a treat as well: Tomeu introduced us to some favorite watering holes and shared some of his delicious homebrew.

3. While hackfests are a treat, what is even more rewarding is seeing the fruits of one's labor. I was in communication this weekend with Christofer, a young hacker from Uruguay whom I have mentioned in past posts. Christofer has been using Unity on Ubuntu and has embarked upon a effort to build his own version of Sugar that incorporates what he sees as the best of both desktops. How cool is that?

Also, the Butia team continues to impress. In this video a 10-year-old explains how he programmed his dancing robot. In this video, the Butia team explains how their system works. Great stuff.

4. My former colleague, Mr. Negroponte, is now saying that the creation of a learning deployment is simply a matter of dropping laptops from a helicopter. Some of the discussion on Slashdot is worth reading. Arguably there are other approaches to deployments. While I would love to have access to Nicholas's yet-to-be-seen-in-the-field reading system, I still believe that a learning community that includes teachers and parents is vital. We have a long ways to go in our learning about learning and undoubtedly we will continue to make some mistakes along the way, but our basic theory of intervention, which includes doing, reflecting, and critiquing is sound.

5. The Learning Team has been discussing various ways to better utilize the Journal in evaluation. (See [2] for the discussion logs). Claudia summarized our discussion topics:

(1) Record in the Journal at any time: Here the intent is to enable editing the description, tags or the title at any time easily from the activity, and not have to wait to get out of the activity. Unlike the button "Save Copy" we have eliminated the last Sugar version, no copy is made, it works on a single entry. [This facilitates the use of the Journal as a lab notebook, where notes can be recorded while the user is actively doing something, not just after the fact.]
(2) Open an activity-specific directories: This is to use the window that is currently used to select objects from the Journal from the activities, to open files in a specific directory, for example, to find examples in Turtle Art. [This will make it easier to provide and share clip art, example projects, etc.]
(3) Modes home / school: A problem raised by some teachers, is that Journals of his students (and school servers) are filled with music or games. With this proposal the child XO offers you in a "school" when working at school or doing their homework, if you are using the XO for their own interests, puts in a "house" (or define l). What is recorded in the Journal will be this way, and also can be changed from the detail view.
This mode also works as a filter, so when school is not listed in the Journal all the games and songs. Furthermore, it only makes backup servers that has been recorded so school, this solves the problem of server space and preserves the privacy of students.
[In discussing this, we agreed that home vs. school is perhaps the wrong dichotomy. Nonetheless, the ability to organize ones work into several different desktops has merit.]
(4) Operations on multiple files in the Journal: allow selecting multiple files for copying to a USB or delete them. [Martin Abente has a much of this feature coded already.]
(5) Activity-specific metadata: The work we have begun with the learning community. The idea is to record data related to the use of activity and display it in the detail view of the Journal. An example can be found here: wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/5/5f/TAtags.png
These data will be used for searching the Journal and will be copied to the server when you have a backup.
(6) Default tags: At this time a tag is any text you type into the Tag field. This makes their use is unclear and not used much. We believe we can improved by making the selection of labels from a predefined (Which you can add new or remove) and display more prominently in the Journal (See a mock-up).
(7) Labels on the activities: We could assign labels to the activities to be seen into the Home View; for example, by selecting activities programming or media handling. [As a start, we can pull these labels from the categories assigned by the activity developer on activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO).]
(8) Audio Tags: We could add the ability to record a short audio associated with the journal entry. We have to think how to record, display and how to limit the length of the audio so it does not take up much space.
(9) Activity achievement badges: Portfolio and work activity showing Journal entries generated by other activities, could have an activity dedicated to show levels of achievement or badges earned by the done in other activities. While simple linear games like Maze or The writer is simple Turtle Art systematically define these awards, can not do something smart to analyze the quality of a drawing, a text or a melody. It could also be a space for the teacher provide feedback and reward achievement. We need to discuss this further.

Also, Claudia Urrea and Gonzalo Odiard have put together several pages in the laptop.org wiki for aggregating ideas: please add to [3] and/or [4] your ideas about those data you think would be useful to record when running an activity; and please use [5] to provide feedback on activities. (Note that we still prefer bugs to be filed at bugs.sugarlabs.org but acknowledge that it may be easier for many people to edit a wiki page than use our bug-tracking system.)

6. The latest sensor project from Guzman Trindad is worth checking out.

7. I attended a lecture from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Subra Suresh last week in which he highlighted a joint program between the NSF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched as international joint initiative to address global development challenges. This new program for "peer" projects. May be an opportunity for revisiting some of the unfunded collaborations we had proposed in 2008 and 2009. If anyone is interested in putting together a join proposal, please contact me.

PEER, "Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research," capitalizes on competitively-awarded investments to support and build scientific and technical capacity in the developing world.

8. I was looking at a collection of African art recently and was inspired by one of the patterns I saw. It was challenging, but I managed a reasonable facsimile in Turtle Art (See File:Bamileke.png). It occurs to me that we could ask our young learners to find patterns--in nature, in their environment, in their culture--and replicate them programmatically. In the spirit of Barry Newell's Turtle Confusion but driven by the direct observations of the kids themselves.

In the community

9. Reminder: As a community member, it is important that your voice be heard. On e mechanism is for you to participate in our upcoming election: We will be holding an election for three Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB) positions at the end of next month. If you are not already a member of Sugar Labs, please send your name and an explanation of your contribution to Sugar Labs in an email to members at sugarlabs dot org. If you are a member, please consider being a candidate for one of the SLOB positions.

10. Laura Vargas announced that there will be a Sugar Camp in Peru 18-19 November (Details are available at http://sugarcamp.somosazucar.org).

11. Is anyone interested in exploring how Sugar Labs might participate in Google Code-in 2012? Information about 2011 can be found here.

Tech Talk

12. Daniel Drake announced 883 as the official OLPC 11.3.0 release. This is the first release to include Sugar 0.94 and it represents a big step forward in terms of stability. Congratulations to everyone who contributed.

13. Meanwhile, Peter Robinson is in the final stages of releasing SoaSv6. He is asking for more testing and feedback. It is looking to be a big improvement over previous releases and, as reported by Tom Gilliard, it is much easier to use on Apple laptops.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks 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

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

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