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===What is Sugar Labs?===

===What is Sugar Labs?===

Sugar Labs creates, distributes, and maintains learning software for children. Our approach to learning is grounded in Constructionism, a pedagogy developed by Seymour Papert and his colleagues in the 1960s and 70s at MIT. Papert pioneered the use of the computer by children to help engage them in the “construction of knowledge.” His long-time colleague Cynthia Solomon expanded up his ideas by introducing the concept of engaging children in debugging as a pathway into problem-solving. Their 1971 paper, “Twenty things to do with a computer”, is arguably the genesis of contemporary movements such as the Maker Movement and Hour of Code.

Sugar Labs creates, distributes, and maintains learning software for children. The project's approach to learning is grounded in Constructionism, a pedagogy developed by Seymour Papert and his colleagues in the 1960s and 70s at MIT. Papert pioneered the use of the computer by children to help engage them in the “construction of knowledge.” His long-time colleague Cynthia Solomon expanded up his ideas by introducing the concept of engaging children in debugging as a pathway into problem-solving. Their 1971 paper, “Twenty things to do with a computer” [Reference needed here], is arguably the genesis of contemporary movements such as the Maker Movement and Hour of Code.

At the core of Constructionism is “learning through doing.” If you want more learning, you want more doing. At Sugar Labs we provide tools to promote doing. (We focus almost exclusively on tools, not instructional materials.) However, we go beyond “doing” by incorporating critical dialog and reflection into the Sugar learning environment, through mechanisms for collaboration, journaling, and portfolio.

At the core of Constructionism is “learning through doing.” If you want more learning, you want more doing. At Sugar Labs we provide tools to promote doing. However, we go beyond “doing” by incorporating critical dialog and reflection into the Sugar learning environment, through mechanisms for collaboration, journaling, and portfolio.

Sugar Labs is a spinoff of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project and consequently it has inherited many of its goals from that project. The goal of OLPC is to bring the ideas of Constructionism to scale in order to reach more children. A particular focus is on children in the developing world. In order to meet that goal, Sugar, which was originally developed for OLPC, was by necessity a small-footprint solution that required few resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, or network connectivity. The major change on focus from the OLPC project is that Sugar Labs strives to make the Sugar desktop available to multiple platforms, not just the OLPC hardware.

Sugar Labs has inherited many of its goals from the OLPC project. The goal of OLPC is to bring the ideas of Constructionism to scale in order to reach more children. A particular focus is on children in the developing world [Reference needed here]. In order to meet that goal, Sugar, which was originally developed for OLPC, was by necessity a small-footprint solution that required few resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, or network connectivity. The major technical change on focus from the OLPC project is that Sugar Labs strives to make the Sugar desktop available to multiple platforms, not just the OLPC hardware. The major ethical challenge Sugar Labs has is to keep supporting with high quality software and equivalent tools to the OLPC ecosystem.

 

 

As with any other non profit, the practice of '''charity''' means the voluntary giving of help to those in need, as a humanitarian act.  

===Who develops Sugar?===

===Who develops Sugar?===

Sugar Labs is a 100% volunteer effort (although we do occasionally raise money for paid student internships). Sugar development and maintenance is incumbent upon volunteers and hence we strive to provide as much control as possible to our community members, including our end-users. (In fact, one of our assertions is that by enabling our users to participate in the development of the tools that they use will lead to deeper engagement in their own learning.) Towards these ends, we chose the GPL as our primary license. It has been said of the GPL that it “restricts my right [as a developer] to restrict yours [as a user and potential developer]”, which seems ideal for a project that wants to engage a broad and diverse set of learners. But at Sugar Labs we go beyond the usual goals of FOSS: a license to make changes to the code is not enough to ensure that users make changes. We also strive to provide the means to make changes. Our success in this goal is best reflected in the number of patches we receive from our community. (We achieve this goal through providing access to source code and development tools within Sugar itself. We also actively participate in workshops and internship programs such as Google Summer of Code, Outreaching, and Google Code-In.)

Sugar is not a 100% volunteer effort. The OLPC project has supported many developers along Sugar's history and many initiatives to allocate resources to support professional services (such are Activity Central, OLPC Australia, etc) have been tried. In the same way, many of the packages that make doable a Sugar distribution are re-cycled from other libre software projects that may or may not be the results of volunteers efforts.

 

Sugar Labs® is supported by donations and is constantly seeking funding to accelerate development of Sugar. We do occasionally raise money for paid student internships as well.  

 

Sugar development and maintenance is incumbent upon its community and hence we strive to provide as much control as possible to our community members, including our end-users. (In fact, one of our assertions is that by enabling our users to participate in the development of the tools that they use will lead to deeper engagement in their own learning.)  

 

Towards these ends, we chose the GPL as our primary license. It has been said of the GPL that it “restricts my right [as a developer] to restrict yours [as a user and potential developer]”, which seems ideal for a project that wants to engage a broad and diverse set of learners. But at Sugar Labs we go beyond the usual goals of FOSS: a license to make changes to the code is not enough to ensure that users make changes. We also strive to provide the means to make changes. Our success in this goal is best reflected in the number of patches we receive from our Community. (We achieve this goal through providing access to source code and development tools within Sugar itself. We also actively participate in workshops and internship programs such as Sugar Camps, Google Summer of Code, Outreaching, and Google Code-In.)

===Who uses Sugar?===

===Who uses Sugar?===