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===Sugar Digest ===
 
===Sugar Digest ===
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The [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005593.html discussion about pedagogy] on the IAEP list intensified this week. My takeaway from the discussion is that while we won't (and don't need to) reach consensus about "one right way" to teach, we must have consensus around our goals as a community or our efforts will become too diffuse to be of any practical use; we are not engaged in an academic exercise—we are touching the lives of real children on a global scale. Indeed, the primary reason we spun One Laptop per Child from MIT (and Sugar Labs from One Laptop per Child) is because we intend to deliver "things to think with" to learners everywhere.  
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1. I'm back from an exhilerating weekend in Paris, where we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the founding of Sugar Labs: Saturday was the OLPC France meeting at La Cantine and Sunday was Sugar Camp at La Ruche—both venues a short walk from my cousin's flat near République.  
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As a community, we have consensus that Sugar and Sugar activities should be freely and readily available to learners everywhere. This would suggest that the developer community continues to strive to make it “simple” to create and share Sugar activities and its efforts to create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms.
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The OLPC France meeting, attended by about 50 people, gave us a chance to network with some old friends and colleagues and build some new connections that will further enhance the Sugar community. For example, Tomeu Vizoso, Bernie Innocenti, and I had a chance to spend time with Bruno Coudoin; we discussed various ways we can improve upon the GCompris integration into Sugar. It was also great to finally meet in person Sugar contributors such as Gary Martin, Sache Silbe, David Van Assche, and Marten Vijn. It was also great that Marco Presenti Gritti was able to attend. The day was broken up into a number of parallel workshops, with a overall focus on deployment needs. Many of us never left the coffee bar, where there was continuous conversation. Kudos to Bastien Guerry and Lionel Laske for organizing a great day at a great venue and bringing together such interesting people.
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But what is Sugar? At one level, Sugar is an API that provides a unified framework for activity developers to support collaboration, reflection, and sharing in their programs. But those features were chosen with a purpose: to encourage learners to engage in authentic problem-solving and a critical dialogue about whatever problem in which they are engaged. Thus engaged, learners will develop skills that help them in all aspects of life.
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About one half of the Saturday attendees came to Sugar Camp on Sunday. Sean Daly organized the day; he provided his flat for an urban camping experience for the attendees and found a great venue overlooking the canal on Quai de Jemmapes. We didn't have preset agenda topics, rather we spend the first hour using SCAMPER to expand our thinking about potential discussion topics (See [[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-05-11]]). From the four topics I had listed as a seed to the discussion, we generated almost 50 ideas. We then used a variant of PPCo to define four topics for the day, which we labelled: Sugar Roadmap, Packaging Sugar, Marketing Roadmap, and the School Experience. Within each group, we iterated upon the process to generate working groups that would be tasked with coming up with tasks and deliverables. (I'll be posting the meeting notes as soon as the group secretaries send them my way.)
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Sometimes that dialog is with your peers, sometimes it is with a teacher or mentor. Sometimes it is open-ended and sometimes it is within the context of structured instruction. In every case, it involves expressing, debugging, critiquing, and reflecting. In every case, it is enhanced by "the hard things to learn", Alan Kay's "non-universals", e.g., reading and writing; deductive abstract mathematics; model-based science; etc.  
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There have been several posting regarding Sugar Camp from the perspectives of the various attendees, e.g., [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005730.html David Farning's] and [Sean Daly's] posts. There was very positive feedback regarding the creativity process—we stretched ourselves and enriched the discussion as a result. And of course, it was great to spend time together. The downside was that we were not at all successful in engaging the online community in the process—in part due to technical difficulties (a flakey network) and in part by not have a good sense of how to do it. This is something we should work on in advance of the next gathering, which will likely be at LinuxTag in Berlin. Another downside was that we really could have used another day or two to go into more depth on some topics, particularly technical themes. A codefest as a follow-up to the weekend would have been ideal.
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The culture of FLOSS, with its emphasis on ''en plein air'' debugging and critique, is part of our pedagogy. Sugar embodies the message that everyone has an opportunity and responsibility to contribute to our knowledge commons. That contribution need not be Python code. Members of the Sugar community must:
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(There are photos from both days in [http://www.flickr.com/search/?d=taken-20090515-&q=sugarcamp&m=text here] and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/50394334@N00/ here] and [http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/pictures/conf/Sugar_Camp_Paris_2009 here].)
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* explore, share, evaluate, and debate best practices;
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2. Tomeu, Marco, Bastian, and I formed one of the afternoon working groups. Our goal was to come up with some concrete suggestions regarding telling the Sugar story. We decided to start off with something pretty basic: the generation of more screencasts of Sugar from a wide variety of viewpoints, e.g., developers, teachers, students, etc. Both Chris Ball and the MediaMods team had written [http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/Screencast-1.xo a screencast activities] that would merit some TLC. Meanwhile, Bastian helped my get xvidcap running on my machine (an HP laptop running Ubuntu Jaunty) so that I could make videos from sugar_jhbuild:
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* provide technical and pedagogical support; and
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* create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
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sudo apt-get install xvidcap
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Roland Gesthuizen, replying in [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005637.html a different thread], had a concrete set of suggestions for teacher participation in our community:
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You can run xvidcap from within Sugar itself from the Terminal activity or, perhaps easier in the context of sugar_jhbuild, run it in parallel with Sugar.
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* report back issues that make using the Sugar interface difficult when used it in the classroom (collaborate)
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I made [http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs/video/15676869 a test video] of the xo-color activity and posted the results to dailymotion.com with tags such as "Sugar" and "activity". I plan on creating a wide range of videos, showing everything from running activities to installing them to debugging them. Let's try to flood Dailymotion with great Sugar stories. (BTW, Dailymotion will automatically convert videos to OGG so that they will run within Sugar without the need for proprietary codecs.) Sebastien Adgnot has already set up [http://olpc.dailymotion.com an OLPC channel] and will make a Sugar channel available as well.
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* develop and share lessons built around applications that work on Sugar (curriculum)
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* share by word of mouth, blog and twitter with colleagues that we are using Sugar (communication)
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* ask deep and hard questions about the learning that goes on when students use Sugar (pedagogy)
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* work to answer these questions (research)
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* and more...
      
===Help Wanted===
 
===Help Wanted===
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In the run up to [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap|the next Beta release of Sugar on a Stick]] Sebastian Dziallas has asked for help with testing all of the activities being considered for inclusion. We'd like to be more thorough in finding any problems so that we can be sure to address them in time for the final release in September/October. There is also a [http://dev.sugarlabs.org/query?status=accepted&status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&component=SoaS Trac query] that pulls up all
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3. We need your Sugar stories.
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of the open tickets for SoaS.
      
===In the community===
 
===In the community===
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The [http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/ OLPC France Sugar Camp meeting] will be held in Paris on May 16.  
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4. The next [http://ceibaljam.org Ceibal Jam] in Uruguay will be in two weeks (30 May and 6 June at the University of Montevideo). Programmers are invited, but also designers, educators, artists, and anyone who wants work in the design, content, programming and testing activities new or improvement of existing activities. Who is coming from SugarLabs?
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There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See [[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009|Paris Sugar meeting]]).
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===Tech Talk===
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A team of Babson College management students will be working with Sugar Labs beginning this fall as part of a Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) Program.
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5. Chris Ball announced on behalf of OLPC that they have decided to base the software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. They plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once.)
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===Tech Talk===
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Christian Schmidt led a [http://meeting.laptop.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090509_1013.html Design Team meeting] this weekend that covered topics such as improvements to the Home View, a clock extension on the Frame; support for printing within Sugar; a global strategy for keyboard shortcuts; and a global dictionary.  
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6. Chris also announced that Build 8.2.1-802 will be the final 8.2.1 Release for the OLPC XO-1 hardware (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1 Release notes] and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1#Upgrade_instructions Instructions for upgrading to the 8.2.1 Release]).
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The [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Food_ForceII Food Force team] has a new release and is looking for feedback. Download the .xo bundle from [http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/downloads/list here].
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7. James Simmons has offered some good advice regarding [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005663.html "Creating Your First Sugar Activity."]  
    
===Sugar Labs ===
 
===Sugar Labs ===
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Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-May-2-8-som.jpg|SOM]]). It is worth a close look this week.
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8. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-May-9-15-som.jpg]]).  
    
=== Community News archive ===
 
=== Community News archive ===
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