Sugar is designed to encourage exploration and learning by children that have not been exposed to or indoctrinated into any existing computing environment.


The Sugar stack

Sugar is implemented on top of existing or modified operating systems and hardware. Sugar Activities ("Sugar-enhanced applications") are accessed by the user from the Sugar platform. Many Activities, such as Browse, take advantage of library collections. Some collections are included with Sugar; others may be installed from the Web or created locally.

Sugar Application Stack (Graphical)

Library
Collections
pre-installed, online,
locally created
Read Write Record EToys TurtleArt et al.
Sugar
Activities
Browse
Application
Framework
Sugar
Operating
System
Fedora Debian Ubuntu Linux, other LTSP Mac OSX] MS Windows
(QEMU)
...
Hardware
Platform
OLPC
XO-1
ASUS
EEE PC
Intel
Classmate
OLPC
XO-2
...

The layers in a Sugar system are:

  • Library Collections (e.g., for the Browse Activity)
  • Sugar Activities
  • Sugar
  • Operating System
  • Computer Hardware

Sugar Application Stack (ASCII Text)

Sugar Labs has borrowed names from carbohydrate chemistry, which includes sugar, to personalize and help distinguish pieces of Sugar software. See Taxonomy and On the Naming of Sugar for background.