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| | == Sugar Digest == | | == Sugar Digest == |
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| − | 1. Marvin Minsky was fond of saying that there is nothing more dangerous than when a roomful of people all agree with each other. We don't have to worry about that in the Sugar community!!! Marvin also observed that "it's very important to have friends who can solve problems you can't." The diversity of our community is its strength.
| + | It has been a long time since I last wrote a Sugar Labs community new blog. I got tied up with my day jobs: starting a new design college from scratch and launching a new research center at MIT. (And, frankly, I was a bit depressed following the deaths of Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert.) I have a breather on both fronts and given all of the Sugar activity of late, I am inspired to do some writing. |
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| − | Another Marvin quote relevant to our current quest to define ourselves as a community: "Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do." As Laura Vargas put it recently, Sugar Labs is a community "where you can learn how to design, develop and deploy high-quality Free Software." Within our community, children and adults are working together.
| + | 1. A footnote from Google Code-in 2015. Ezequiel Pereira, one of the grand-prize recipients from Sugar Labs was recently acknowledged by Google for discovering a security bug. He got some nice press, e.g., [https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/08/10/highschool-security-research-google-data/#.tnw_5BETRGWT][https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/10/schoolboy_google_bug_bounty_http_host/1]. In one article [http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/google-awards-uruguay-high-school-student-10k-finding/story?id=49249604], he was quoted as saying: "Homework is boring. Looking for bugs is fun.” Ezequiel is one of a generation of children in Uruguay who grew up with Sugar. It is nice to hear the occasional word about their accomplishments. |
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| − | 2. Sam Parkinson is our new release manager. Sam, a former GCI winner from Australia, has been responsible for many of the patches to the Sugar toolkit over the past few releases and has also been one of our most prelific code reviewers. Martin Abente, our release manager for the past four releases, has agreed to mentor Sam during the transition. Tip of the hat to Martin for all of his contributions and continued support. | + | 2. We just wrapped up Google Code-in and Outreachy 2017. We had 9 interns supported by Google and 1 Outreachy intern. You can read about their accomplishments in their [[Summer_of_Code|blogs] and in the meeting logs [http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings] (every Monday from May through August). Highlights from the summer include a new, easy-to-maintain activity portal and a new www.sugarlabs.org, both going live soon. Also of note: a new Sugar image for Raspberry Pi, some new apps, GTK3 ports, a Sugarizer dashboard, and a major overhaul of Music Blocks. |
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| − | 3. Mariah Noelle Villarreal just got back from the Google Code-in reunion, where she represented Sugar Labs. She had a chance to meet Ezequiel and Piotr, our two winners, and spend time with members of the other participating projects. Mariah brought multiple copies of Sugar on a Stick to hand out and reports that there was a positive reception, especially among some of the parents in attendance. She also voiced some disappointment with the degree of awareness of Software Libre among attendees. FWIW, Devin Ulibarri and I are working on a new paper regarding the importance of Software Libre to education. Stay tuned.
| + | Tip of the hat to our mentors: Abhijit Patel, Cristina Del Puerto, Devin Ulibarri, Hrishi Patel, Ignacio Rodriguez, José Argüello, Lionel Laské, Matias Baez, Michaël Ohayon, Samson Goddy, Samuel Cantero, and Tony Anderson. Lionel help me administer the program again this year. It is nice to note that many of the mentors are former GCI participants. |
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| − | 4. I just got back from a trip to Santiago, Chile, where I was hosted by the education division of Fundación Chile. (Cecilia Rodriguez Alcala Garcia, formally of Educa Paraguay, was responsible for my invitation to run some workshops and give a keynote address at Creo Chile.) The theme of my workshops was programming as a vehicle for engaging in critical thinking. I introduced Turtle Blocks and Music Blocks first to a team of engineers from throughout the foundation, then to an executive group, then to a "hacker" group attending the Creo Chile event, and finally to a group of children and their parents. I was assisted by Andrea Vasquez Garcia, without whom I would have been lost. In addition, I participated in a workshop run by a local rap artist, Nelson Bobadilla Alvarado, and an educator, Francisca Petrovich Ursic. We did a collaborative, interactive Music Blocks program, whereby we could programmatically participate in the performance. A bit crude, but I learned a lot in the process. My keynote, which I have uploaded to [[File:FchBender2016.pdf]], focused on Sugar and the role of Software Libre in education.
| + | Cristina, Michaël, and Samson will be representing Sugar Labs at the annual mentor summit at Google in October. (For those of you who have been following the saga of Samson's visa, I am happy to say that he was approved!) |
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| − | In the workshop for executives, I was challenged to write a Turtle program to calculate the expected value of the number of coin flips required to get three heads or three tails in a row. My response can be seen at [http://walterbender.github.io/turtleblocksjs/?file=threeinarow.tb].
| + | 3. I was invited to represent Sugar Labs at the Plan Ceibal 10th anniversary in Montevideo a few months ago. It was great to see children still using Sugar 10 years after the first deployment in a small school in the Florida Department. It was also an opportunity to catch up with many old friends and Sugar contributors, including Ignacio, Andres, Alan, Jose Miguel, Guzman, etc. I am not sure if my talk is on line, but I wrote a paper based on the talk which is available for [http://www.um.es/ead/red/54/bender.pdf download]. |
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| − | One sub-goal of my trip was to seek advice regarding a reference machine for Sugar. Alas, I was not yet able to get a definitive answer, as the foundation does not directly distribute hardware and the ministry of education has a wide variance in the types of machines they distribute. But I hope to get some feedback on this topic in the coming weeks.
| + | 4. Lionel just announced a new release of Sugarizer (v0.9). See [http://sugarizer.org] for all of the details. |
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| − | While I was in Santiago, Chile defeated Mexico in the Copa América. I credited the win to Sugar (and the Chilean futbol shirt I was wearing). Hopefully it will mean that Sugar will find a warn reception in Chile.
| + | 5. James Cameron is working towards the release of Sugar 0.111, our first new release in nearly one year. It is mostly planned as a maintenance release. |
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| − | 5. Google Summer of Code is well underway. Mentors are writing mid-term evaluations this week. Be sure to check out the great work being done by our interns, including [https://github.com/sugarlabs/edit-fonts-activity], [http://vikramahujagsoc.blogspot.in/], [https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/313#discussion_r63140566], [http://musicblocks.net/2016/06/13/multiple-rhythm-rulers/], [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAHUOBJ7fqk], and [https://iamutkarshtiwari.wordpress.com/].
| + | 6. There are only a few more days left (15 Sept.) to register as a candidate for the Sugar Labs oversight board. Please consider joining the board as we need some fresh voices and perspectives. See [[Oversight_Board/2017-2019-candidates]] for details. You also have until 27 Sept. to register as a member in order to be given a vote in the election. See [[Sugar_Labs/Members]] for details. |
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| − | 6. On the flight back from Santiago, I wrote a Python script to convert glif files into Turtle Block projects. (Tip of the hat to Eli Heuer for providing me some sample glif files.) The results are quite fun (See [http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/?file=a.tb]). Next up, a version where each knot and control point is represented by a turtle, and thus the glyph will be editable.
| + | 7. One of the first decisions the new board will be making is whether or not Sugar Labs should apply for GCI 2017. I am hopeful that the board will see the merits of the program and give a green light to apply again this year. If we do apply, I will be looking for mentors, project ideas, and a co-administrator. Please contact me if you are interested. |
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| − | === In the Community ===
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| − | 7. Gary Stager has written a nice [https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-07-as-the-maker-movement-turns-45-gary-stager-pays-tribute-to-m-i-t-computing-pioneer-cynthia-solomon tribute to Cynthia Solomon] in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Maker Movement.
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| − | 8. Please join us every 1st Friday of the month at UTC 1900 on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting.
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| − | === Tech Talk ===
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| − | 9. Sam has announced the second release leading up to Sugar 0.110. Recent changes include:
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| − | * James Cameron fixed Gtk 3.6 compatibility and an edge case with bundle erasure
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| − | * Utkarsh Tiwari added a WiFi password visibility toggle
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| − | * Abhijit Patel added a PopWindow api for sugar toolkit
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| − | * Sebastian Silva fixed Broadway compatibility for `sugar-activity`
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| − | * The [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Tick_based_animation smooth animations feature] landed
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| − | * Git submodules are now supported by the bundlebuilder
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| − | * Improved Gtk 3.20 support
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| − | * Misc bug/interface fixes
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| − | Sam has been busy updating the [https://developer.sugarlabs.org/sugar3/sugar3.graphics.icon.html API documentation] and is soliciting feedback. Also, Sam has updated Fedora [https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/samtoday/sugar/ COPR] with the new versions of the Sugar packages. Tarballs for sugar, sugar-toolkit-gtk3 and sugar-artwork are in the usual places on the download server [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/].
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| − | 10. Tom Gilliard reports the availability of Sugar spins for Fedora24 ([http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/unofficial/releases/24/x86_64/Fedora-SoaS-Live-x86_64-24-20160614.n.0.iso x86_64], [http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/unofficial/releases/24/i386/Fedora-SoaS-Live-i386-24-20160614.n.0.iso i386]).
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| − | === Sugar Labs ===
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| − | 11. Please visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet].
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