Archive/Current Events/2015-02-03

Sugar Digest

In schools, all hardware and software bestow agency on one of three parties: the system, the teacher, or the learner. Typically, two of these actors lose their power as the technology benefits the third. Ask a group of colleagues to create a three-column table and brainstorm the hardware or software in your school and who is granted agency by each. Management software, school-wide grade-book programs, integrated learning systems, school-to-home communication packages, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and other cost-cutting technologies grant maximum benefit to the system. Interactive whiteboards, worksheet generators, projectors, whole-class simulations, plagiarism software, and so on, benefit the teacher. Personal laptops, programming languages, creativity software, cameras, MIDI keyboards, microcontrollers, fabrication equipment, and personal web space primarily benefit (bestow agency to) the learner. -- Gary Stager

1. Google Code-In. Wow. Finally a chance to catch my breath. Seven intense weeks: 60 students completed more than 300 tasks for Sugar Labs. The impact on Sugar Labs was even greater this year than in the previous years we have participated: more diversity among the participants, the mentors, the tasks, and a spirit of collaboration while striving for excellence prevailed throughout the contest. Thanks to Google and Stephanie Taylor for giving us this opportunity, to the contestants who not only did great work but taught me a thing or two along the way, and the mentors and community members who manned the IRC channel 24/7.

I want to acknowledge the Top Ten+ from whom we will be selecting our finalists this week (results announce in early February):

Ignacio Rodríguez, Daksh, samdroid, cristian99garcia, Ezequiel Pereira, svineet, Gtrinidad, Jas Park, Rafael Cordano, Richar, Sergio Britos, Aishmita Kakkar, Gabriel Lee, et al.

Also, some mentors (and community members) deserve special recognition: Andrés Aguirre, Daniel Francis, Gary Servin, Gonzalo Odiard, James Cameron, Jorge Ramirez, Mariah Villarreal, Rajul, Rodrigo Parra, and Martin Abente Lahaye.

Finally, a few projects worth mentioning:

Turtle Blocks JS plugins (Ignacio, samDroid, Daksh)
Turtle Blocks guides (Jas Park) [1]and [2]
Activity reviews (Gabriel Lee)
Dasher app (Cristian Garcia)
Enhancements to Physics (Svineet)
Sugar bugs squashed (Ezequiel)
Butia Measure (Gtrinidad)
Simple scrolling interface for Sugar (Rafael)

and much much more.

2. As mentioned above, we have a number of new Turtle Blocks plugins (for both the Python and Javascript versions) as a result of Google Code-in. One of the more interesting inspirations for plugins comes from mashape.com, a repository of APIs for everything from translation services to a bicycle theft alert system. As Sugar becomes more web-friendly, we can take advantage of web services and also facilitate our users to craft their own tools and services. It is fun and empowering.

In the community

3. The Free Software Foundation has put together a nice video on the core ideas behind Free Software.

Tech Talk

4. Xevents is a TurtleBlocks plugin that makes it easy to design different types of accessibility interfaces through a variery of physical sensors types. It is being developed at FING by Andrés Aguirre and Alan Aguiar and was the focus of some of the Google Code-in work of Rafael Cordano.

5. For you OLPC XO 4 users, James Cameron has been working on enabling the second processor. He reports "about 38% improvement. For CPU tasks like rendering, alt/tab, kernel compiles, the improvement is somewhat more than 38%. For single threaded tasks that rely on memory bandwidth, performance is lower because the memory controller is shared between two cores." When asked how it impacts Sugar, he said "it feels faster and more responsive."

6. Martin has announced the tarballs for the last 0.103.x UNSTABLE release of Sugar before 0.104 STABLE. (We delayed the release a few weeks in order to take advantage of all of the bug fixes coming in from Google Code-in.) With this release we reach the API, UI and String freeze (See 0.104/Roadmap.

It's time to switch focus on updating translations, everyone can contribute through or new Pootle instance. We have time until February 13, before the 0.104.0 STABLE release.

Sugar Labs

7. Please visit our planet at [3].