Archive/Current Events/2009-11-30

Sugar Digest

1. When Tony Forster modified the Physics activity within 24 hours of its initial posting on activities.sugarlabs.org, it was a sign that educators, not just developers, were beginning to take a lead in determining the shape of Sugar. But even more important than contributing patches is contributing to the growing body of knowledge about how to use Sugar for learning. Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez has been an outspoken voice on the Sur list, telling stories from her classroom (Rosamel is a teacher in Uruguay) and challenging the community in regard to using technology for learning to its maximum potential. She has recently blogged about some innovative uses of Turtle Art, which naturally caught my attention, and wrote a remarkable post on the Sur list about guided discovery. It is really gratifying to hear these stories from the field.

2. We held an oversight board meeting on 20 November. We passed a motion to close the slobs@ list to just SLOBs, move current slobs@ traffic to iaep@ with a [SLOBS] subject line tag where at all possible. We also passed a motion to give a two-week deadline to the Sugar-on-a-Stick decision panel. We spend the remainder of the meeting discussing our trademark policy. We are examining the policies of other projects to get ideas about how we might amend our own policy going forward. We'll continue the discussion on iaep@ and at the next scheduled meeting, Friday, 04 December, 2009 – 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST). Minutes and a log from the 20 November meeting are available in the wiki.

Help Wanted

3. The Sugar-on-a-Stick team is looking from someone to help them with documentation. Please contact the list (soas@) if you are interested.

4. There is interest at the ministry of education in the Republic of Macedonia in learning more about Sugar. If a quick trip to Skopje is within the realm of possibilities, please contact me.

Tech Talk

5. Erick Lavoie and the Tutorious team have put together an .iso image that is available for testing. Please download tutorius-20091118.iso from http://bobthebuilder.mine.nu/isos/. The image is based upon the soas04.iso.

To create a tutorial inside the Calculate Activity:

1. Start the Creator by pressing the "double bubble" icon near the Tutorial list under the Activity tab;
2. Add actions like BubbleMessage from the toolbox window shown on the right;
3. Add events like Gtk Event Catcher (choose the "clicked" event type);
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until satisfied;
5. Save;
6. Quit

To execute the tutorial created:

1. Close and restart the Activity;
2. Select the tutorial from the list

Sugar Labs

6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).