Sugar Labs/Current Events
What's new
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. Hats off to Simon Schampijer and Sascha Silbe who have released Sugar 0.92. While primarily a maintenance release, there are some new feature of note; for example, better handling of Sugar Journal objects when copied to/from removable media. Release notes coming soon.
2. Last week, I was in Lima, where Claudia Urrea, Kiko Majorga, Sdenka Salas and I ran some workshops for teachers and teacher trainers: 1000 teachers on Monday and 25 teacher trainers and curricula development specialists on Tuesday and Wednesday. The theme was ostensibly robotics: Peru is distributing robotics kits to all of the schools. We walked through lots of different approaches to using Sugar to interact with the physical world, through sensors and software (Turtle Art, Scratch, Etoys, Measure). We had them build sensors, calibrate them, and then program some activity with them. They made great progress and had lots of fun. Sugar enthusiasm abounds!
They are in the process of migrating to 10.1.3 as well as distributing machines to high-school students running Fedora with Open Office installed. (These machines will also include Scratch and the GNOME version of Turtle Art, which has undergone a great deal of refactoring.)
3. Other activities: I connected Sebastian Silva and Somos Azucar up with a group at the US Dept. of State who is interest in English-language learning. They are going to develop tools for a pilot in Colombia. When he returns from paternity leave, he can give us an update. Also, I have been contacted by three commercial companies who are interested in working with Sugar: UK company that makes class-participation tools has ported their system to Sugar and is looking for help with pilots (they may do a pilot in Peru); a Korean company is interested in porting some Sugar apps to Android – interesting in light of the ongoing discussion on IAEP list; and a Canadian company that has been making constructionist-like learning tools for more than 30 years. Also, OLPC France is working on a new activity to let children build stories; this is a request from a foundation in France who wants to deploy this activity in several schools by the end of April.
4. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) has a preliminary version of Sugar running in the “Cloud”. He is using VNC to push the output of Sugar running in a VM to a browser. It works remarkably well and may well be the easiest way to demo Sugar to potential users.
5. Raul Gutierrez Segales (now working at Collabora) and I have been working on extending Sugar-collaboration to GNOME, using Turtle Art as the test case. It is quite exciting to be able to work transparently between the GNOME desktop and a Sugar instance. We'll be pushing out an RPM and a new version of the .xo file in a few days.
We've been doing a lot of refactoring of the code with some unexpected results: since you can share bitmaps and since you can now use the camera as a sensor, you can write a video broadcast system in Turtle Art – it takes all of three blocks (well, 7 blocks if you want it to work well). Meanwhile, Tony Forster and Guzman Trinidad have been cranking out great science and engineering projects using sensors and sounds.
Part of the refactoring effort has been to make it easier to plug new devices into Turtle Art. At present, there are plugins for the camera, audio sensors, and RFID tag readers. There are plugin projects to support Arduino, Lego WeDo, Lego NXT, and the GoGo board.
6. Belated thanks to Laura, Alex, Parul, and Julie, the MIT marketing team that did an analysis of Sugar Labs. Their final presentation can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/marketlabsugar/
Help wanted
7. One recommendation from the marketing team is to add more pictures to the website that show kids using Sugar. Please send candidate favorite pictures to the Sugar Marketing team.
8. Sebastian Silva posted this call for volunteers:
- We've started a good friendly relationship with one of the more interesting deployments of OLPC in Colombia, specifically in Medellín. They are looking for volunteers that will help them with English. We think this is a great opportunity for a Sugar volunteer to work in a Deployment and engage the Maureen Orth deployment with the rest of the community. See Vacancies.
In the community
9. We had a preliminary brainstorming session regarding what types of projects we might do in conjunction with the Sugar Labs cycling team's participation in the Tour of Uruguay at the end of April. Read about it here: Vuelta a Uruguay.
Tech Talk
10. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has been making steady progress on Sugar images for use in virtual machines. In particular, he is getting much better (more stable and consistent) results on MAC hardware. See Emulator image files#Other virtual machines. The Trisquel image is particularly compelling.
11. Fred Grose has been working on SoaS-remix: a bundle of edit-liveos.py and supporting scripts to make testing and use of Sugar on a Stick easier. See Sugar on a Stick/Sugar Clone.
12. Yioryos Asprobounitis announced a new version of Sugar running in Puppy Linux. See the full announcement here: [1]
Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.
2011 Feb 12-18 (70 emails)
2011 Feb 5-11 (78 emails)
Jan 28-Feb 4 (88 emails)
Visit our planet [2] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
Community News archive
An archive of this digest is available.