Sugar Labs

HowTo [ID# 9565]

Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computing and the Internet. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Through Sugar's clarity of design, children and their teachers 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.

Everything is saved automatically.

Our goal is to make it almost impossible to lose any data.

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 available on many GNU/Linux distributions.

Sugar is supported by and easily installed on Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.

Sugar is free software.

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

Latest news

Read a Sugar community member's take on Sugar vs XP and the Groklaw take.
The Sugar Activity manuals are starting to appear on the FLOSS Manuals website. Check out the manual for Write and write a manual for your favorite Activity.
Minutes from the Sugar Labs meeting on 5 September 2008.
The Sugar community has cast their votes; the newly elected Sugar Oversight Board members are Walter Bender, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Chris Ball, Greg Dekoenigsberg, David Farning, and Bernie Innocenti. We'll be holding our first meeting on the #sugar-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net on Friday, 5 September, at 14:00 UTC.
The FLOSS Manual for Sugar is now online Sugar Manual; please help improve it. Many thanks to Adam Hyde, Anne Gentle, David Farning, Mikus Grinbergs, Brian Jordan, Adam Holt, Janet Swisher, Morgan Collett, Yama Ploskonka, David Cramer, Emily Kaplan, Faisal Anwar, Christoph Derndorfer, Sandy Culver, Aaron Konstam, and the Sugar community.
Aaron Kaplan has ported Sugar to the Intel Classmate 2. You can read about it here.
Sucrose 0.82 has been released.
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.

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.

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.