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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

Revision as of 16:23, 13 April 2012

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== Sugar Digest ==
 
== Sugar Digest ==
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1. I spent last week in Miami participating in a "vacation camp" at [http://blog.laptop.org/2012/01/27/olpc-and-knight-foundation-launch-digital-literacy-program-in-miami-school/ the Holmes Elementary School] in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_City Liberty City] for 3rd and 4th graders. The camp was organized by David Jessep and participants include Melissa Henriquez, Reuben Caron, Dan Lee, and Claudia Urrea. The Holmes laptop program, which is sponsored by the Knight Foundation, is challenging in that the school had been under performing by the Florida state metrics, so the typical class day is now quite structured. So there is very little unscheduled classroom time. The vacation camp presented an opportunity for the children to spend some informal time with their laptops and, for the first time, bring them home.  
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1. Over last weekend, OLPC hosted a documentation sprint at their Cambridge office. It was great to meet a number of new-to-me faces, including Craig Perue and Mark Battley, with whom I enjoyed a great conversation about how we can make Sugar (and Sugar documentation) more useful. As a result, we are trending more towards documenting not just what and how, but also why and how. Many thanks to Adam Holt for organizing the event and also to everyone who participated -- those who came from long distances, such as Nancie Severs, Bill Stelzer, Sameer Verma, Christoph Derndorfer, Laura de Reynal, and Ed Cherlin, as well as those who participated remotely, such as Caryl Bigenho. The results can be seen in refreshed wiki pages and a new Help activity.
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Melissa ran a Scratch workshop while I ran, no surprise, a Turtle Art workshop. In both workshops, the children were given a few warm-up exercises and then set off in small groups to do projects of their own choosing. For the Turtle Art group, I had them do the usual: one child volunteered to be the turtle and the other children instructed it in how to move about the room. Then they explored the turtle, pen, and color palettes. In our second session, I introduced a few new locks, including some of the multimedia and sensor blocks. We then designed an alarm clock of sorts: the children helped each other use the Record activity to take a picture pretending to be sleeping and a second picture, with a startled from sleep expression. They taught their turtles to display the "asleep" pictures and then polled the loudness block, waiting for a conditional block to be triggered by a loud sound. At this point, the "startled awake" picture was displayed.
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2. Claudia Urrea and I spend the first half of the week in Managua with Felix Garrido and the deployment team at Fundación Zamora Terán. The overall purpose of the visit was to discuss strategies for evaluation in light of the foundation's recent expansion of its laptop program to the Island of Ometepe. I spent some time acquainting the learning team with the latest feature of the Portfolio tool and some enhancements to Sugar that will "make learning visible" not just to administrators, but also to the learners themselves. While we were there, also I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Drake and consume some taco soup.
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From there, the children went in many different directions, but one theme, dance, spread throughout the group. They began taking pictures of themselves in different dance positions and then using Turtle Art to animate their moves. Some of them incorporated sound and additional turtle graphics. One child, taking his own path, used sensors from the WeDo to control the speed of a motor. All of them wrote about their work in their Journals and used the Portfolio activity to make presentations to their parents at the end of the week. Pretty awesome stuff.
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During the conversation with the learning team, the topic of nutrition came up. FZT is working with USAID on a nutrition curriculum. We discussed ways to integrate the curriculum into Sugar, by or example, using the Turtle Art [[Activities/TurtleArt#Nutrition|Food Plugin]]. I was inspired by our discussion of the Food Pyramid, so on the flight back to Boston, I wrote a new activity, [[Activities/Nutrition]]. What is potentially fun about it is that not only can you explore the precompiled database of foods, but you can also load your own foods into the database. So, for example, a child could take a photo (using Record) or draw a picture (using Paint) of dinner, and then load that food into the activity.
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2. For reasons yet to be determined, once again we were turned down for Google Summer of Code.
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3. The Scratch team has updated their license documentation such that it is once again compatible with Sugar's Free Software guidelines. Please see [http://info.scratch.mit.edu/GPLv2_Licensed_Scratch_Code].
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4. There continues to be growing interest in localizing Sugar to indigenous languages. The latest project is with the Nahuatl language. The work is being done in cooperation with the State Government in San Luis Potosí through the Secretary of Education, the Universidad Politécnica de San Luis Potosí (UPSLP), the Instituto de Lenguas Indígenas. There is also interest in starting a program in the Xi'úi languaje (Pame).
    
=== In the community ===
 
=== In the community ===
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3. There will be a OLPC/Sugar documentation sprint from April 6-10 at the OLPC headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Please contact Adam Holt if you are interested in participating, either in person or on line.
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5. Details for [http://ceibaljam.org/?q=edujam2012 eduJAM!] the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo are available. eduJAM will be followed by a [[EduJAM/CodeSprint|code sprint]] on the 13th and 14th.
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4. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.
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5. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).
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=== Tech Talk ===
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6. There is a new Etoys release candidate ([ http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-5.0.2402.tar.gz 5.0.2402 candidate 1]) available for download. Enhancements of note include:
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* single stepping in scripts
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* "attached watchers" following the object
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* graph paper and number lines
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* a scriptable calendar
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* a sector object (e.g. for pie charts)
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* ScratchConnect allows to connect Etoys and Scratch
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Congratulations to [[User:Bertf|Bert]] and the Etoys team!!
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7. Aleksey Lim announced the latest in community-driven downstream Sugar distributions: [[Platform_Team/Harmonic_Distribution|Hexoquinasa]], which is being tested in [http://pe.sugarlabs.org/go/Proyecto_Piloto_Hexoquinasa Puno]. Aleksey summarized the goals of the project as:
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6. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 17-19) and May 21-22 in Buenos Aires.
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* The possibility to launch Base Software in heterogeneous software and hardware environments.
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* Using Base Software, provide access to various Content (Sugar activities, artifacts created by Sugar activities, books, etc.) created within the Sugar community.
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* Using Base Software, provide collaborative functionality to support Social activity around the Content.
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* Instruments and workflows to adapt Content and Base Software to specific needs that Sugar Deployment might face, including extreme ones like off-line environments and restricting hardware.
      
=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
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File:2012-Mar-10-16-som.jpeg|2012 Mar 10-Mar 16th (36 emails)
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File:2012-Mar-31-Apr-6-som.jpg|2012 Mar 31st-Apr 6th (14 emails)
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File:2012-March-3-9-som.jpg|2012 Mar 3rd-Mar 9th (69 emails)
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File:2012-Mar-24-30.jpg|2012 Mar 24th-30th (6 emails)
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File:2012-Feb-25-Mar-2-som.jpg|2012 Feb 25th-Mar 2nd (27 emails)
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2012-March-17-23-som.jpg/275px-2012-March-17-23-som.jpg|2012 March 17th-23rd (17 emails)
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File:2012-Feb-18-24-som.jpg|2012 Feb 18th-24th (9 emails)
   
</gallery>
 
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Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
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Visit our [http://plant.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
    
== Community News archive ==
 
== Community News archive ==
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