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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

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=== Sugar Digest ===
 
=== Sugar Digest ===
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1. In the spirit of making Sugar and Sugar Activities readily appropriated and modified by the end user, I have been distracted of late writing code. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I have been working on a refactoring of Turtle Art in order to make it easier to extend by teachers—[[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-02-10|a long-standing goal]]. I have an ulterior motive as well: making Turtle Art (and other Activities) easier to maintain. Towards that effort, I have been reworking and streamlining some of the library classes: specifically, the sprite module and the graphics generation module. The focus on these libraries is to address a typical problem I struggle with: localization. The Turtle Art graphics are assembled from a combination of pre-composed artwork and strings that are translated as part of the localization process. A word or phrase that is short in one language might be long in another, e.g., 'left' in English and 'izquierda' in Spanish. Coming up with static graphics that can accommodate this degree of variation has been a challenge. The original Turtle Art graphics were bitmaps (GIF), which are not readily amenable to manipulation. In an earlier refactoring, I converted the graphics to vectors (SVG), but I still have had to do a lot of hand-tuning of the artwork, saving the results in individual files for each language. In the case of Turtle Art, this has been unwieldy: thousands of files are involved. The solution I am exploring is the dynamic generation of the graphics, where I combine the use of SVG and Pango. I am hopeful that the end results will not only be easier to maintain, but will also enable more facile extensions to the base Activity. To test some of these ideas, I updated the [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4246 VisualMatch Activity] to use the new libraries. It not only allowed me to streamline the Activity itself, but it also made it much easier to add new play modes—adding Mayan took less than 30 minutes—and adding end-user editing—it was suddenly trivial to allow the users to modify the cards used in the word game. I'm close to pushing these changes into Turtle Art as well. Hopefully we will see more local forks of the code as the barriers to modification and maintenance are lowered.
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2. Speaking of Turtle Art, there is a wonderful essay on the origins of the Logo turtle at [http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711].
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3. Most of the work we have been doing during our [[Oversight_Board/Minutes|December and January Sugar Labs oversight-board meetings]] has been in regard to our Trademark policies. We are very close to reaching consensus on a [[Talk:Sugar_Labs/Governance/Trademark#Sugar_Trademark_Policy|redrafting of our policy]]. Please add your comments and give us your feedback before our next meeting, Friday, 22 January, at 16UTC (11EST) in #sugar-meeting on irc.freenode.net.
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1. I am once again falling behind in my writing. This time I have two excuses: travel and coding. I spent last week in Miami, not to escape the cold Boston winter, but to attend the OLPC deployment meeting. (This is first time since I left OLPC almost two-years ago that I have been invited to participate in an OLPC event.) It was great to see many old friends with passion in their hearts for the project. The highlight of the week was of course the presentations from the deployments. Many of the larger OLPC deployments gave detailed updates of the progress and plans—all of which include Sugar. The variety of means by which the deployments engage in outreach was fascinating. For example, in Paraguay, which still has a relatively modest deployment, they have been setting the stage for an eventual nationwide roll-out by publishing weekly “how-to-use Sugar” storyboards in the newspaper. In every case, the deployment teams have been considering not just the technology, but also their cultural context. The vector is pointing in the right direction.
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A concrete idea that surfaced during the discussions was to explicitly add the creation of a local Sugar Lab to the offering whenever OLPC partners with new deployment. The local lab would provide the means for the local community to nurture growth in their local Free Software community and to engage with the global Sugar community more systemically and efficiently. Another result from the meeting is that Claudia Urrea, one the education/deployment leads for OLPC, will be joining our Design Team meetings. Her direct feedback will be very helpful.
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2. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I are finally to the point where we would like some testing and feedback on the Turtle Art refactoring project. We have been rewriting much of code over the past month with several goals in mind: (1) make it easier to maintain; (2) make it easier to localize; (3) make it easier to incorporate new features; and (4) make it easier for the end-user to modify.
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So far, we have:
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* completed a major refactoring of the code
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** object-oriented
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** 90% smaller download bundle-size
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** faster first-time launch
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** simplified i18n maintenance
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** easier to add new blocks and palettes
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* added new user interface features
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** support for multiple turtles
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** expandable blocks
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** trash palette (with a restore button)
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** variable-length string blocks
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** editable strings
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Still to come:
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* a new collaboration model, where multiple turtles are shared
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* conversion to Cairo graphics for the Turtle
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* better program visualization during run-time
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You can download the new Turtle Art for testing from: [[File:TurtleArt-83.xo]]. The source is in the [http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/turtleart/repos/refactoring/trees/master refactoring branch] of the TurtleArt project on gitorious.
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3. It is worthwhile to periodically check on the Sugar-related materials being created in the field. For example, the teachers in Uruguay continue to assemble lesson plans for using Sugar in the classroom at [http://www.reducativa.com/wiki2/index.php?title=Proyecto_OLPC_-_Plan_Ceibal
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the Plan Ceibal website]. There is a real wealth of materials there.
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4. Thanks to an introduction by Chuck Kane, I am in touch with the team that developed GeoGebra. [http://www.geogebra.org GeoGebra] is free software for learning and teaching mathematics. Written in Java, “it combines interactive geometry, algebra, calculus, and spread-sheets in one easy-to-use system for students of all ages.” It could be a candidate for Aleksey Lim's [[Activity_Team/Services|Sugar Services]] efforts.
    
=== In the community ===
 
=== In the community ===
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4. I gave two short talks about modifying Sugar over the weekend: one in Washington DC at the OLPC Learning Club meeting and one in Wellington, New Zealand at the Linux Conference Australia (LCA) education miniconference. (In both cases, I appeared remotely, saving a bit of wear and tear on my body and my carbon footprint.) My notes are available on line as well: [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/d/d8/LCA-Education-MIniconference-Bender.pdf].
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5. The call for papers for the [http://academic-conferences.org/icel/icel2010/icel10-minitrack.htm 5th International Conference on e-Learning] has been extended until the 22nd January 2010. This is a good opportunity to submit some abstracts about Sugar.
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6. Kaçandre Bourdelais announced the creation of [http://www.franxophonie.org FranXOphonie], a community portal for Sugar projects in Francophone countries around the world, including Senegal, Haïti, Cameroon, Vietnam, Central Africa, Rwanda, Libreville, Madagascar, Mali, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and, of course, France.
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5. Kevin Mauricio Benavides Castro pointed out to me an article about the work going on in rural Nicuaragua (See http://impreso.elnuevodiario.com.ni/2010/02/02/contactoend/118357).
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6. Cristian Paul Peñaranda Rojas has created an XO-man-inspired case for Sugar-on-a-Stick. You can download the CAD model from  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1659
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7. Hilaire Fernandes
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, the author of [http.//wiki.laptop.org/go/DrGeo DrGeo], is looking for feedback on his interactive geometry software (developed with Squeak and deployed
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on Etoys).
    
=== Tech talk ===
 
=== Tech talk ===
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7. Simon Schampijer convened a meeting of the design team to discuss a number of open-ended design issues for Sugar 0.88. The most hotly debated topic has been the question of how to best accommodate both 'start new' and 'resume' on the Home View. Part of the contention has been a lack of consensus regarding the role of the Home View vs. the Journal in resuming Activities. A seemingly reasonable compromise has been reached—although we will have to do some thorough testing before pushing the change. The gist of the compromise is to make the Journal a permanent part of the Home View—thus more accessible—a change that has merit in itself. Gary Martin has made some mock-up images as a means of visualizing the ideas being discussed (See [[:File:Home_mockup_with_journal_icon_and_start_new_default_1.png|1]] and [[:File:Home_mockup_with_journal_icon_and_start_new_default_2.png|2]]).
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8. Sascha Silbe's version-support fork of Sugar is available for testing. Please see [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-January/021941.html] for details.
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9. Sascha's VNC-based sugar-emulator (which can be used instead of the often problematic Xephyr) is also available for testing. If you use sugar-jhbuild and have had problems with keyboard mappings or window-manager interactions, you may want to try the VNC version.
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8. The Design Team is meeting with great regularity and is making progress on many of the 0.88
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features. You can follow the progress in the [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/0.88_Meeting|wiki]].
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=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
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10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2010-January-9-15-som.jpg|SOM]]).
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10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past two weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2010-Jan-16-22-som.jpg|SOM]] and [[:File:2010-Jan-23-29-som.jpg|SOM]]). The latter image does a nice job of visualizing the on-going [[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-January/009933.html discussion about trademarks]].
 
=== Community News archive ===
 
=== Community News archive ===
  
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