Outreachy

This page contains information specific to the May 30 to August 30, 2017 round of Outreachy internships.

About Sugar Labs

At Sugar Labs, we make tools that learners use to explore, discover, create, and reflect. We encourage our users to appropriate them, taking ownership and responsibility for their learning.

Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization, had its origins in the One Laptop Per Child project and is has been a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy since 2008.

Sugar is both a desktop and a collection of Activities. Activities, as the name implies, are Apps that involve active engagement from the learner. Activities automatically save results to a journal, where reflections are recorded. Activity instances can be shared between learners; many support real-time collaboration.

Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.
Activities, not applications: Sugar activities are applicable beyond the scope of the classroom and even Sugar itself.
Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data.
The Sugar Journal records everything you do: It is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work.
Sugar runs on most computer hardware, including slower machines.
Sugar is Free (Libre) Software: It is written in the Python language and easily customized.
Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.
Sugar is largely written and maintained by its users.
Sugarizer is a fork of Sugar available for tablets and phones.

Our primary FOSS License is GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPL-3.0).

About Our Community

As mentioned above, our community is composed 100% by volunteers. May (most) of are contributors are youth who use (of have used) Sugar in school. We have participated in Google Code-in and Google Summer of Code for many years, which have also been a source of contributions to the project.

Our community members span the globe—and while we have never had a commit from Antarctica, Sugar has been used on every continent. Contributors bring many skills: Python and JavaScript programming; graphic design; marketing and communication; documentation; user-interface design; game design; pedagogy; research into best practices; and, perhaps most important, using Sugar as a tool for learning.

Our mentors are:

walter AT sugarlabs DOT com
devin AT devinulibarri DOT com

Getting Started

These days there are a number of different paths to getting started with Sugar. You can:

follow the instructions for setting up our developer environment [1];
try Sugarizer [2]; or
explore some of our stand-alone activities such as Music Blocks [3].

We have lots of open issues in our various GitHub repositories: [4] and [5], some of which involve some coding, but many of which involve testing and documentation.

About Outreachy

Schedule

February 16: participating organizations are announced and application system opens
February 16 - March 30: applicants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it
March 30: application deadline at 4pm UTC
March 30 - April 28: applicants are encouraged to continue making contributions for the project they applied for; submitted applications are open for editing
April 28: accepted participants announced on this page at 4pm UTC
May 30 - August 30: internship period

Payments Schedule

Please refer to [6] for details about how the SFC administers payments for the program.