Summer of Code/2016

Students: See our guide on how to participate in Google Summer of Code for more information.

Project candidates

In the table below is a list of projects potential participants might contribute to in the GSoC program.

Note 0: These are project ideas from Sugar Labs contributors. Students, feel free to propose your ideas as well.
Note 1: 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 2: Potential students, more project ideas can be found on our Features page.

Sugar Core

Title	Mentor	Project
Journal Rethink	Sam Parkinson	Brief explanation The Sugar Journal could be rethought to add more emphasis on collaboration, or adding more organisational support for creating "projects" amongst other things. Expected results Working code for the journal, and vauge ideas (more concrete than this) defined ahead of time. Knowledge prerequisite Strong background in Python and knowledge of Gtk+.
Git backend	Martin Abente Lahaye and Walter Bender	Brief explanation The Sugar Journal doesn't do a great job of supporting versioning or forking. This project is to build a backend for the Journal that is based on git, which does support versioning and forking. By building on top of a git hosting site we get the added benefit of network access as well. Expected results Working code and an integration with Turtle Blocks Knowledge prerequisite Strong background in Git and scripting languages such as Python, Ruby and JavaScript.
Performance tuning on machines with limited memory	Samuel Greenfeld and James Cameron	Brief explanation The newer Sugar builds have performance issues on some old hardware with limited memory. This is keeping some Sugar deployments from upgrading. This project is to look into the performance issues and tune Sugar for low-memory devices. Expected results build suitable for running on OLPC XO-1 hardware Knowledge prerequisite
Re-design collaboration with web technologies	Martin Abente Lahaye and Walter Bender	Brief explanation Now that JavaScript has become a first class citizen in the Sugar ecosystem, we must re-design our collaboration model to allow collaboration between web activities regardless of the platform. Knowledge prerequisite JavaScript, web sockets, web services.

Sugar Activities

Title	Mentor	Project
Beyond Flashcards: Programming to ReadJS	Walter Bender	Brief explanation Back in the 1980s, IBM had a literacy program, "Writing to Read". The gist was that writing was a great way to spark a child's interest in reading. What if writing code could achieve a similar result? The project is to explore how programming might be incorporated into a literacy program. Like turtle, only simple sentences instead of stacks. It would be a "whole word" approach rather than a "phonics" approach: they can take "sentences" and make paragraphs that result in animations. Expected results Working prototype Knowledge prerequisite Strong background in Python or JavaScript
Covert Record, Clock, Speak and Measure to gstreamer 1.0	<TBD>	Brief explanation The vast majority of Activities that use gstreamer for sound have been converted to gstreamer 1.0 because the older 0.10 is now End of Life and is no longer being developed. It also adds quite a large set of extra duplicate dependencies to Sugar distributions. There's a lot of good examples of Activities that have been converted to provide excellent examples. The gstreamer 1.0 bindings are provided by gobject-introspection so it also assists in the conversion of Activities to gtk3. Expected results As many of the above Activities converted to use gst 1.0 Knowledge prerequisite Strong background in Python, gobject-introspection and gstreamer
Covert TamTam to Csound6	<TBD>	Brief explanation TamTam makes extensive use of CSound, other Activities like Memorize, Pippy, and TurtleBlocks also can make use of CSound bindings. With the introduction of CSound 6 to a number of distributions TamTam needs migration to use the newer version of CSound. Expected results Convert TamTam to use CSound6, possibly other Activities Knowledge prerequisite Strong background in Python, background in CSound

Sugar Activities (Ports)

These are existing Python activities we'd like to see ported to JavaScript. In porting we expect that the activities will take on new UI features and pedagogical significance.

Title

Mentor

Project

Music Blocks Challenges

Devin Ulibarri

Brief explanation: Development of the "Power Piece" concept for teaching music and programming. (Power Pieces introduce rich musical ideas that can be studied, analyzed, transformed, and re-imagined, they are ripe for open-ended explorations.)
Expected results
Knowledge prerequisite: Strong background in Javascript, Music

File:Banana.png

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Nutritional Microworld

w/Dr. Jessica Early

Brief explanation: We have the basic building blocks (Turtle Nutrition) for programming with food as a datatype. What we are missing is a collection of meaningful activities to use with the tool as exemplars. We want to develop a an open-ended, yet

relevant tool—one that invites learners to explore fundamental concepts of nutrition that are both intrinsic to music yet transcendent of a specific discipline.

Expected results
Knowledge prerequisite: Strong background in Javascript, some background in Nutrition.

Turtle Confusion/Flags JS

Walter Bender

Brief explanation: Port of Turtle Confusion and Turlte Flags.
Expected results
Knowledge prerequisite: Strong background in Javascript

Sugar Technology

Sugar is based on the Python programming language and the GTK libraries. We also support some web technologies: HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

	Title	Mentor	Project

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