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. The Chipote/Sugarlabs cycling team won a stage in the Rutas Américas race in Uruguay this past week. By the big race, the Tour of Uruguay (Vuelta a Uruguay) is not until next month. We have been accumulating some great ideas for learning activities for the children of Uruguay to engage in leading up to and during the race (See Vuelta a Uruguay). We are lacking someone to coordinate these efforts in Uruguay: package up the ideas; get the word out to the teachers and children, etc. Please let me know if you are interested in helping.
2. Speaking of Uruguay, it seems that there is consensus to hold a Sugar Camp in Montevideo in conjunction with Ceibal Jam's EduJam in May 5–7. The plan is to add two days (Sunday/Monday, May 8, 9) of coding just after the main conference. Details to follow. In the week prior to the Camp, there will be a "Conozco Uruguay" Community Exploration Tour for those interested in seeing Sugar in action in the schools of Uruguay.
We do need to discuss some of the details of the Camp. Please add you ideas to the wiki page.
3. There will also be a Squeakfest in Montevideo at the end of May (26–28 at Universidad Católica del Uruguay).
4. Christian Marc Schmidt and Gary Martin have been holding weekly design meetings. Along with Sascha Silbe and others, we have been making a lot of progress on a number of backlogged issues. You can read the logs here: 2011-02-13, 2011-02-20, 2011-02-27, 2011-03-06 and 2011-03-13
5. Rather than writing my column for the Sugar Digest, once again I have gotten sucked down a coding rat hole :). My two terrible addictions seem to be coffee and Python. Since I last posted, I have been doing more work on the Turtle Art plugin mechanism. I have two community efforts under way to use plugins: Ian Daniher wrote a plugin for WeDo and Emiliano Pastorino has written a plugin for NXT. (An Arduino plugin is also in the works.) I got lots of great feedback from both of them (as well as Raul and Tony) and made some adjustments that will be part of Release 107.
Also, as part of Release 107 is better handling of shared turtles when using Turtle Art collaboratively. With the help of Simon, Gonzalo, and Tony, I managed to sort out a number of little problems that added up to a lot of confusion: for example, you can no longer drag a turtle that someone else is sharing with you. This fixes a problem with synchronization of shared turtles (#2687). Also, the problem with extra turtles appearing when you open a project under a new 'nickname' has been fixed (#2441).
6. I also wrote a new game: Paths. It is based upon a game I played with Oscar Becerra in Lima a few weeks ago. The basic idea is to create closed paths using tiles on an 8×8 grid. A collaborative version will be available soon. Meanwhile, download it and play against the robot.
7. I have also been working on a 'learn to read' activity with a Canadian educational foundation. Details available soon.
Help wanted
8. As mentioned above, we need help on the ground in Uruguay for Vuelta a Uruguay.
Tech Talk
9. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has done some experimenting with Sugar running with GNOME 3 (See F15/Gnome3/Sugar0.92 for details).
Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.
2011 Mar 5th-11th (21 emails)
2011 Feb 26th-Mar 4th (55 emails)
2011 Feb 19th-25th (63 emails)
Visit our planet [1] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
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: [2]
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 [3] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
Community News archive
An archive of this digest is available.