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 ==

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.

2. Following up on a thread begun in mid July [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-July/013736.html] the Sugar oversight board passed a motion to empower Sugar Labs to award certificates to developers to acknowledge and celebrate their contributions to the Sugar Learning Platform. Several certificates will be made available, based upon the area of contribution. The certification mechanism is decentralized: the specific criteria for certification will be determined by the Sugar Labs team coordinators; in general, it will involve a repeated effort on behalf of the team's goals at a high level of quality.

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

As an example, the Activity team may issue a Sugar Activity Developer certificate to an individual who develops at least one Sugar activity that is subsequently posted on the Sugar activity portal and be of sufficient quality to be approved for public release. The activity must also include internationalization, including the submission of a POT file to the Translation Team, and documentation, including the creation of a page in the wiki under the Activity category. As will the Contributor certificates, sign off will be made by the associated team coordinators, in this case the Activity team.

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.

3. Gary Martin, Manuel Quiñones, Gonzalo Odiard, Rafael Ortiz, and I have been busy working on the Sugar toolbars. You can follow our progress here: [Design_Team/ToolbarCatalog]. Our goal is to provide a consistent framework for all activities and to make sure that all of the Fructose activities have been ported to the 0.86-style toolbars before the next releases from both OLPC and AC.

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!

4. As part of the toolbar cleanup, I could not resist adding a feature to the Distance activity that I have wanted since the first time I saw it demonstrated by Ben Schwartz. There is now a toolbar for adjusting the units used – the default is still meters, but you can measure in centimeters, inches, feet, or yards as well. In addition, you can use the current distance being measured as your unit of measure, i.e., Distance will let you measure in 'Smoots' (See [http:wikipedia.org/go/Smoots]). I also made an updated activity page for Distance here: [[Activities/Distance]].

4. There has been a [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-July/032339.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 one 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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpkDmWFdw video] using (of course) Turtle Blocks.

5. The OLPC team in Australia has a new discussion portal that has been seeing many posts from teachers using Sugar ([https://www.yammer.com/australianxoteachers]). One of the teachers, Frank Van Den Boom, was looking for a Powerpoint equivalent in order to let children manipulate pictures of currency. Van Den Boom has some learning exercises relating to currency that involve building equivalencies with different bills and coins. Of course, I immediately thought of how Turtle Art might be used for such an exercise. After doing the obvious: rendering images of money, I opted to write a plug in that provides a palette of coins and bills that can be used as if their were number blocks [[File:Oz_currency.png]]; e.g. they can be used with the various arithmetic operators and they can be used with the various turtle commands. A silly but revealing example is shown here [[File:US_currency.png]]. You can download the plug ins for various currencies from here: [[Activities/TurtleArt#currency]]

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 Slipstream/Garmin/Cevelo cycling team on winning the Tour de France 2011. Slipstream is the pro team with which the Sugar Labs/Chipolte U23 team is also affiliated.

6. During a discussion [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-July/013831.html] about curricula guidelines, Gary Martin generated a self-organizing map for the Science Education Framework published by the United States National Academies (See [File:K-12_science_education_framework_13165_som.jpg]). I thought it would be interesting to how some other guidelines mapped, so I asked him to generate some from the Newton Public Schools, a well-regarded US system (See Curriculum Overview Documents for Parents, "Your Child's Year in Grades K- 8" [http://www3.newton.k12.ma.us/content/grade-level-curriculum]).

The results are fascinating: [[File:Grade_K_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_1_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_2_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_3_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_4_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_5_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_6_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_7_2010_som.jpg]] [[File:Grade_8_2010_som.jpg]], particularly the frequency of words such as 'identify', 'understand', and, my favorite, 'appropriate'.

[[File:CCC-StartingLine.jpg|thumb]]

 

7. Nickelodeon and MTV in conjunction with OLPC is staging an international contest for the best narratives generated using Sugar (See [[Nick-MTV]] for details).

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

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

8. Daniel Drake has created [[Features/GTK3|a page in the wiki]] for discussing the migration to GNOME 3.0. There is a section for [[Features/GTK3/DesktopSummitActivities|The Desktop Summit]], which is underway in Berlin. Raul and friends have already gotten a Sugar Hello World running (See http://people.collabora.co.uk/~rgs/tmp/gtk3-activity-in-sugar.png).

 

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

 

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

 

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

9. Hilaire Fernandes has announced Release 11.08 of DrGeo, which is fully working with the latest stable Sugar release (See http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4323). Additional features include:

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

<gallery>

<gallery>

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

File:2011-July-9-15-som.jpg|2011 July 9th–July 15th (29 emails)

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

File:2011-July-16-22-som.jpg|2011 July 16th–July 22th (41 emails)

</gallery>

</gallery>

Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

== Community News archive ==

== Community News archive ==