Archive/Current Events/2011-10-05

Sugar Digest

1. It seems that this is the season for Sugar Camps. The Paris Camp was by all reports quite successful. Christoph Derndorfer reported on Days 1 and 2 of the camp, which focused mainly on deployments and emerging educational activities from OLPC France. Daniel Drake reported progress on the Sugar development front during the code sprint track:

Raul and I spent most of last weekend's Sugarcamp Paris working on removing hippocanvas from Sugar, with some help from Simon too. This was based on earlier work by Raul and Walter.
To just give a quick update, we made a lot of progress. Many things that had been hacked or disabled in the initial efforts were restored with clean code. We got down to just a handful of closing tasks.

Gustavo Ibarra announced a Sugar Camp in Junin, Buenos Aires, Argentina next weekend: 25, 26 September. There will be a Python programming workshop on the learning platform and a Sugar Code Sprint.

Also in Paris next week, Sean Daly will represent Sugar Labs in presenting "OLPC/Sugar Deployment to Madagascar island of Nosy Komba" at the Open World Forum,

Mariana Ludmila Cortés, Pablo Flores, and I are giving a Sugar workshop on the tail end of an OLE conference in Mexico City at the end of the month.

There will be an OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2011 on Friday, October 21 at 5:00pm at the SFSU Downtown Campus.

The Prague Sugar Camp at the end of October is coming into focus. Since Daniel and Raul have made so much progress on the no-hippo work, we'll be able to spend most of our time looking at Gnome 3.0 and introspection issues. One by-product of this push to future-proof the Sugar platform is the re-engagement of some of our key developers, such as Marco Presenti Gritti, whose code reviews have been most welcome.

Finally, Somos Azucar announced plans for a Camp in Lima to focus on Quechua and Aymara translations for mid November.

2. In addition to the aforementioned work on indigenous languages in Peru, a the Mexican team of about a dozen has completed the Huastec (Téenek) language localization of Sugar (and most of Etoys) in about one month See [1]. The same team is looking into working on Nahuatl work. In Paraguay, there is some work in Guarani. It is great that Sugar will be available in a child's first language. Having a strong first language is critical to developing good language skills in general. Many thanks to Chris Leonard and the many local teams he is working with. Also, a tip of the hat to Aleksey Lim and Rafael Ortiz who have been working behind the scenes to sort out issues with the Pootle workflow.

3. The Butia Team at la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de la República has some more Turtle Art plugins: one for Follow Me and one for Sumo robotics. See Video 1 and Video 2. Plugins are available in this file download, www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/files/followme_ta_plugin.zip

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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