Sugar Labs

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You are browsing the Sugar Labs community wiki. For an introduction to Sugar, please visit the official Sugar Labs website.

Sugar is a learning engine for every child. It provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection, developing skills that help children in all aspects of life.

Sugar features

Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration.

Write documents, share books and pictures, or make music together with one mouse click.

There are no files, folders, or applications.

Sugar has activities. Activities includes an application, data, and history. Activities can be resumed at any time.

Everything is saved automatically.

Our goal is to make it impossible to lose any data.

A Journal is used for accessing data.

The Journal is a diary of what you make and do; it is a place to reflect upon your work.

Sugar is available on many GNU/Linux distributions.

Sugar is supported by and easily installed on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Fedora. Sugar runs on most computer hardware including netbooks.

Sugar is free software.

It is written in Python and easy to customize. Sugar is licensed under the GPL; updates will always respect the freedom of its users. Sugar's parent organization, Sugar Labs, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Sugar is documented by its users.

Our manual was written by members of the Sugar community and teachers around the world are creating a wealth of pedagogical materials for Sugar. You can help!

Latest news

Watch some videos of children in Uruguay explaining how they use Sugar ([1] and [2]).
and read these stories from the field.
The latest [memo on learning] by Marvin Minsky
The latest Sugar features (0.83.4) are documented here.
The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
ActivityTeam formed. Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.
OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development, but "OLPC's decision to end its participation in Sugar's evolution doesn't mean that Sugar itself will be coming to an end any time soon. Former OLPC president of software, Walter Bender, who left the organization last year, launched Sugar Labs to facilitate ongoing community-driven development of the Sugar project. Sugar Labs has done well for itself—it recently joined the GNOME Foundation and is currently in informal talks with some hardware vendors."
Sugar Labs is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board.
Sugar Labs officially joins the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Sugar Labs will be participating in FUDCon, which will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January. If you can attend, please sign up on the FUDConF11 wiki page.
Walter Bender gave the keynote at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on 1 December 2008. His notes from the conference are here.
SugarCamp was held 17–21 November in Cambridge. Notes for most of the meetings are linked from here.
We continue to make progress on the LiveCD and LiveUSB versions of Sugar.
Read a Sugar community member's take on Sugar vs XP and the Groklaw take.
Check out the FLOSS manual for Write and write a manual for your favorite Activity.
Aaron Kaplan has ported Sugar to the Intel Classmate 2. You can read about it here.
Sucrose 0.82 has been released.
Sugar wins a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08.

For more news about Sugar Labs, please see visit the Current Events page.

Try Sugar

Try Sugar by running it on top of your existing system (Please see the Try Sugar page).

There are many ways to get Sugar: as a separate disk image on an existing machine; as a session on a Linux distribution; or as part of a complete hardware-software platform.

Some Sugar Activities

Sugar applications are called "Activities". Activities include an application as well as sharing and collaboration capabilities, a built-in interface to the Journal, and other features such as the clipboard.