Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)





== Sugar Digest ==

==Sugar Digest==

"Teaching is means making people learn what you want them to learn. Sharing is finding out what interests people and helping them to learn whatever it is they want." –Eben Moglen quoting a youth in a Bangalore slum

1. The big news this week is Daniel Drake's announcement that OLPC has released V11.2.0 for the XO 1.0 and XO 1.5 hardware. This is a significant release in that it pulls in many of the newer Sugar features into an official OLPC build for the first time. Congratulations to Daniel and all of the contributors and testers who helped to get these bits released.

1. Raul Gutierrez Segales, Bernie Innocenti, Luke Faraone, Stefan Unterhauser (Dogi) attended a mini Sugar Camp at my house this week. (Daniel Drake helped remotely.) We set our sights on eliminating Hippo Canvas from Sugar in preparation for an eventual migration to GNOME 3 and better accessibility support. (Hippo is no longer supported by Fedora, so one way or another, we will want to remove that dependency.)

Details of new features, known issues, and how to download/install/upgrade can all be found in the release notes [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/11.2.0].

We've concentrated on the sugar-toolkit and sugar libraries; we'll look at the Sugar activities with Hippo Canvas dependencies in a second iteration.

2. I spent last week in Argentina. I had a chance to get back to La Rioja and connect with the tech team there and we shared ideas about current and future plans for Sugar. (Alas, it was a holiday week, so I couldn't get to any schools in order to get direct feedback from teachers.) They are doing well, but are looking for more ways to make connections to teachers; we kicked around the idea of setting up Saturday clubs--a la Caacupe--to directly engage the kids in programming Etoys, Scratch, and Turtle Art.

You can track our progress at [http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/sugar/no-hippo-sugar] and [http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/sugar-toolkit/no-hippo-toolkit].

3. While touring Argentina, I spoke with numerous ministries of education. In almost every conversation, we got around to discussing the acronym ''du jour'', STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Any program that hopes to find its way into classrooms—from Buenos Aires to Boston—needs to pay lip-service to STEM. While STEM is less debilitating than its predecessor, “21st Century Skills”, it is still very narrow in its scope and vision. But in the case of STEM I see an opportunity. If we add the Arts to STEM, we get STEAM. Now that could be hot!

So far, we replaced CanvasIcon (a HippoCanvas) with an Icon embeddded in an EventBox. Seems to work pretty well, except that I haven't quite gotten transparency working in the EventBox yet. We replaced the toolbox (also a HippoCanvas) with a Container. We took Tomeu Vizoso's work on removing Hippo from favoritesview, integrated it with the new CanvasIcon class and got the Sugar Homeview working. Finally, we refactored the Journal Detail View, again using the new Canvas Icon class. Things are not working 100% yet, but we are within sight of our goal.

4. There has been a [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-July/03

2339.html discussion on Sugar-Devel] about [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342192419/pulse-sensor-an-open-source-heart-rate-sensor-that a pulse sensor built for Arduino]. It was observed that using the microphone-input port on the XO would let do something similar using Sugar. Guzman Trindad has built a simple sensor using an LED, a light sensor, and a clothespin to do exactly that. See his video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpkDmWFdw] using (of course) Turtle Blocks.

Feel free to jump in.

5. Congratulations to Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru, the top three winners in the Copa America. Again there seems to be a high correlation between Sugar and success in international football. Also, congratulations to the Garmin/Cevelo cycling team on winning the Tour du France. This is the pro team with which the Sugar Labs/Chipolte U23 team is affiliated.

=== In the community ===

=== Tech Talk ===

2. Bastien Guerry announced that OLPC France is preparing its 2nd International Sugar Camp, to be held in Paris, 9–11 September.  

6. Martin Langhoff has announced [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-July/032402.html the XO 1.75 contributor's program.]

3. Among the prizes for the Tux Paint Kids Summer Drawing Contest (See http://blog.worldlabel.com/2011/tux-paint-kids-summer-drawing-contest.html) will be OLPC XO laptops and Sugar on a Stick!

7. Raul Gutierrez Segales has been making headway on the "no Hippo" branch of Sugar and Sugar Toolkit. You can track the progress at

 

4. Marco Pesenti Gritti has been working on a framework for HTML activities (See http://marcopg.org/2011/06/12/html-activities/ for details).

http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/sugar-toolkit/no-hippo-toolkit

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

<gallery>

<gallery>

File:2011-Jul-2-8-som.jpg|2011 July 2nd–July 8th (54 emails)

File:2011-Jul-16-22-som.jpg|2011 July 16th–July 22nd (45 emails)

File:2011-Jun-25-Jul-1-som.jpg|2011 June 25th–July 1st (51 emails)

File:2011-Jul-9-15-som.jpg|2011 July 9th–July 15th (63 emails)

File:2011-Jun-18-24-som.jpg|2011 June 18th–24th (43 emails)

File:2011-Jun-11-17-som.jpg|2011 June 11th–17th (105 emails)

</gallery>

</gallery>