Sugar Labs

HowTo [ID# 8350]

Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Through Sugar's clarity of design, children and their teachers have the opportunity to use computation on their own terms; they are free to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful learning activities. Sugar is a community project; it is based on GNU/Linux, a free and open-source operating system.

Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration.

Children write documents, share books and pictures, or make music together with ease.

There are no files, folders, or applications.

The basic unit of interaction is an activity; it includes an application, data, and a history of the interaction that can be used to resume the activity at any time.

It is almost impossible to lose data.

Everything is saved and backed up automatically.

A Journal is used for accessing data.

The Journal is a diary of things that you make and actions you take; it is a place to reflect upon your work.

Sugar is free and open-source software.

Sugar is licensed under GPL; updates will always respect the freedom of its users.

Latest news

We are in the midst of a week-long book sprint, with the goal of creating manual for Sugar. Please follow our progress at Floss Manuals and feel free to create an account and help with writing, illustrating, or editing.
Aaron Kaplan has ported Sugar to the Intel Classmate 2. You can read about it here.
Sucrose 0.82 (Development Release) has been released.
We have begun the election of the Sugar Labs oversight board; polls close 31 August. The list of candidates can be found here.
Minutes from the Sugar Labs meeting on 1 August 2008.
Sugar wins a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08 (See [1])
A governance model for Sugar Labs has been posted to the wiki (Please see the governance page). Feel free to add comments.

Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that a new release (080607) of the Livebackup XO-LiveCD is available (XO-LiveCD).

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

What are the Sugar Labs?

Sugar is available under the free software GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs”, a (soon to be established) non-profit foundation will serve as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and create Sugar-compatible applications. Sugar Labs software is found on the XO laptop. You can find more out about the project at laptop.org.

Learn more about Sugar... or learn about Sugar Labs, the organization behind Sugar

Get involved in the Sugar development and community efforts.

Try Sugar/Get 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. (Please see Sugar on Ubuntu for instructions on how to load Sugar on your Ubuntu distribution.)

Activities

Sugar applications are called Activities. This is a list of some Activities that are installed by default. There is a proposal for an Activity portal.