Archive/Current Events/2014-10-01
Sugar Digest
I took the summer off from blogging, hence I have a lot to report about the exciting progress we've made of the past three months.
First, congratulations to our ten participants in Google Summer of Code:
| Project | Student | Mentor | Blog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Music Suite | Aneesh Dogra | Gonzalo Odiard | |
| Turtle Art 3D | Anubhav Jaiswal | Tony Forster | |
| Activity Unit/UI Tests | Gaurav Parida | Daniel Narvaez | [1] |
| Port to Python 3 | Kunal Arora | Sameer Verma | |
| Bulletin Board | Nazrul Haque Athar | Walter Bender | [2] |
| Hack a Stuffed Animal | Jade Garrett | Stephen Thomas | |
| Social Help for Sugar | Prasoon Shukla | Paul Cotton | [3] |
| Cordova Container for Sugar | Puneet Kaur | Lionel Laské | [4] |
| Sugar Listens | Rodrigo Parra | Martin Abente | [5] |
Also, thank you to both Google, for once again letting us participate in this great program and to our mentors, who gave time and attention to the students. I am happy to say that we not only learned a great deal, e.g., Kunal's efforts have informed us as to what we will need to do to migrate to Python 3, but also, we have landed (or will land) much of the work.
For example, one of the projects, Turtle Art 3D, is now available for download from the Sugar Activity Library [6].
2. We held a Turtle Art Day in San Antonio Texas in August as part of Open Ed Jam, organized by Mariah Noelle Villarreal. Tip of the hat to Ruben Rodriguéz, whose TOAST (Trisquel with Sugar) image was used in the workshop.
We used USB keys donated by Nexcopy as part of their Recycle USB campaign.
3. Speaking of Turtle Art, Cynthia Solomon, Claudia Urrea, and I wrote a paper, "(More than) Twenty Things to Do in Turtle Blocks" for the Constructionist Conference in Vienna. We made some videos as well. See [7].
In the community
4. There will be a Youth Summit held in Montevideo September 20-23. ANEP (National Administration of Public Education) and Sugar Labs are organizing a World Junior Programmers Summit, a meeting among youths from different parts of the world who are working in software development. Taking advantage of this gathering, we are soliciting participation by leaders of educational programs interested in the potential that technology has on learning and in promoting meaningful participation of students.
This event will last for four days, three days for the youth meeting, and the fourth day for a series of strategic discussions on the current impact and future of the Sugar learning environment. The first day of the youth event will be open to anyone interested in joining the community of free software developers, while the other two days will be for those who are already actively involved in Sugar development.
Who should attend:
- Youths who have an interest in programming and / or have made concrete contributions to the development of the Sugar learning environment;
- Leaders interested in participating in a series of strategic meetings to define the future of the Sugar learning environment.
Why participate in this meeting:
- To work with internationally recognized young Python developers;
- Help define the future of the Sugar learning environment and future generations of software for learning;
- To connect with experts convinced of the potential of technology in development and learning;
- To strengthen the community of users of the Sugar learning environment around the world.
Anyone interested in participating in this important event should contact us immediately. ANEP has offered funding to cover the local costs for youths to participate in this event.
Registration is here: [8]
Tech Talk
5. Martin Abente oversaw the release of Sugar 102 and is now gathering feature requests for Sugar 104. Please see 0.104/Feature_List.
Sugar Labs
6. Please visit our planet at http://planet.sugarlab.org