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 and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An archive of this digest is available here.

Sugar Digest

1. Worth a read: Dave Farning sent a pointer to an Open University report on "the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning community in formal educational settings" (Please see FLOSSCOM Phase 2 Report). While the focus is on higher education, what I found of particular relevance is the discussion of collaboration and reflection in FOSS projects and its potential transfer to the classroom.

Community jams and meetups

2. Game Jam Peru: Hernán Paches announces an upcoming Game Jam at the Universidad de San Martín de Porres in Lima on 23–25 October.

Tech Talk

3. Sucrose final release: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar community is working on the final release (0.82) for the Sucrose (Please see the Sugar Timeline).

4. Dr. Geo: Hilaire Fernandes is looking for feedback on some screencasts he has been preparing to explain the DrGeo features (Please see DrGeo screencast).

5. "Hard fun": Mark Goadrich and his student Nolan Baker are seeking feedback on three educational games (COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell Management) they have been developing for Sugar this summer (Please see COBBLE; Space Tag; and Cell Management).

6. x2o: Alex Levenson reports the first release of x2o, a physics problem solving game in which you create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to get the O to land on top of the X (Please see X2o).

7. Sugar-presence-service: Guillaume Desmottes reports that a new release of the Suagr Presence Service is available (Please see sugar-presence-service-0.82.1.tar.bz2). This is the "Woo I'm stable!" release.

8. Activity updates: Read 49; Terminal 15; Log 12; Pippy 24; Calculate 21; Etoys 87; Write 57; Browse 95; and Journal 97.

9. Wine: John Gilmore is seeking feedback as to what class of MS-Windows programs would be of high-priority for Sugar users. (Please see Sugared Wine for more information about Wine, a GNU LGPL licensed implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix and Sugar).

10. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports "significant support" for 18 languages (not including English) for Sugar 0.82:

Language % of translated strings
Greek 100
Sinhala 100
Turkish 100
Dutch 99
German 99
Kinyarwanda 98.5
Spanish 97.5
Nepali 97.5
Italian 97
Kreyol 97
Marathi 96.5
Mongolian 95.5
French 95
Telugu 94
Urdu 93.5
Slovenian 82.5
Dari 80
Pashto 80

Thanks to all the translation teams for their hard work.

Sugar Labs

11. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). Sugar and Work are surrounded by OLPC, lab, education, development, and community.

Sugar in the news

18 July 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 June 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 June 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 June 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 June 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 June 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 June 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 June 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 June 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 June 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

 15 May 2008 Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs