Changes

===Sugar Digest===

===Sugar Digest===

1. The Sugar Labs Development Team continues to make great progress towards our next release, Sucrose 0.88. Last weekend a "testing day" was held in which most of the new features were exercised. There will be another meeting on Monday (February 22) at which we will be discussing various outstanding details as we approach "string freeze" on March 1. What has been significant in this release cycle has not only been the steady progress we have been making on improving and stabilizing the core Sugar platform, but also the introduction of a more systemic mechanism for proposing, vetting, and implementing new features. While the procedures we have put into place are still in need of fine-tuning, we have seen progress on one key goal—greater involvement from Sugar deployments. Sugar remains a volunteer-run project and thus it is what its community makes of it. Our release process is intended to provide a stable and predictable base from which the community can build. Long-term maintenance and growth will come from our community. A goal for Sucrose 0.90 is to have a well-defined set of features, proposed from downstream, and developed downstream. Sugar, like learning itself, is not something done for it. It is something you do for yourself.

1. In a conversation last night with Ivan Krstić, when asked what was "new and exciting" about Sugar, my response was "nothing, which is a good thing". I then elaborated: Sugar is approaching a level of maturity where our milestones are stability and robustness rather than the introduction of "exciting" new features. This is evident in the 0.88 release—, which has relatively few new user-facing features, but many advances in terms of "under-the-hood" improvements that will make long-term deployment and maintenance easier. (I don't mean to imply that Sugar is no longer an exciting project—the fact that we will soon surpass 2-million users is very exciting. And I find it thrilling to eavesdrop on the discussions by teachers regarding how they are using Sugar in advancing learning.)

2. Tony Forster, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés, Michael Stone, and Edward Cherlin have given me detailed feedback on the new Turtle Art. Raúl will be testing it this week in the field and I hope that with that additional feedback to be able to make a final release as part of Fructose 0.88. If you'd like to give it a test drive, please download it from the wiki:

You can help us reach our stability goal by testing, reporting bugs, and joining in our triage efforts. We will be having a triage session next Monday, 1 March 2010, at 9EST (14UTC) on irc.freenode.net (channel #sugar-meeting). Please join us as we review open tickets.

[[File:TurtleArt-83.xo]]

2. There is a nice compilation of recent academic papers on one-to-one computing (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Papers]. Gary Martin has generated some self-organizing map (SOM) images of the papers (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers]). To me, the most interesting take-away is the observation that access to computing at home has a significant impact on learning. This is an affirmation of the OLPC principle of child ownership—all too often children are not allowed access to school computing resources outside of school hours—and it suggests that approaches such as Sugar on a Stick, which allows the learning platform to travel with the child from the classroom to home may be even more significant than we had realized.

New user-interface features include support for multiple turtles (this enables the learner to engage in many of the types of problems opened up by learning systems such as StarLogo). To facilitate debugging, there is now runtime block highlighting and highlighting of the block that raised an error. Boolean logic is now prefix instead of infix, which makes it consistent with the arithmetic operators and less ambiguous in its visual parsing. Many other UI improvements, a trash palette (with restore), variable-length, editable string blocks, labels on coordinate-grid overlays, etc. were driven by feedback from the field.

===In the community===

We also completed a major refactoring of the code, resulting in a 90% smaller download bundle-size and a faster first-time launch. Our goal here is greatly simplified maintenance, more decentralized localization and easier extension with new blocks and palettes.

3. Joy Ventura Riach, manager of the One Laptop per Child Africa Regional Center in Kigali, lead a learning discussion on IRC last week. It was great to hear something about what is happening on the ground in the various OLPC deployments. The discussion continues this Thursday, 25 February, at 10EST (15UTC) on www.oftc.net (channel #olpc-learning).

3. Sugar on a Stick, Blueberry, is now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) permanent collection.

4. Marisa E. Conde, who is participating in the OLPC/Sugar deployment in San Martín, Argentina, shared an informational website to the Sur list (See [http://www.modelo1a1.com.ar]).

===In the community===

 

=== Help Wanted ===

4. Sorry for the last minute notice, but Joy Ventura Riach from One Laptop Per Child's regional center in Africa is organizing Learning Team chats. The first meeting will be on Thursday, February 18, at 10 EST (15 UTC). Join the [http://bit.ly/9TxkwD discussion].

6. We could really use someone to take on the leadership role on testing. While we have some great testing resources and individuals in the community, having someone who is actively coordinating these efforts would make a huge difference. Please contact me or Simon Schampijer (erikos) if you are interested in such a role.

===Tech talk===

===Tech talk===

5. Thanks to the efforts of Luke Faraone, Sugar Labs has received some  servers donated from the Wikipedia project. They will be deployed in various locations, including RIT, Washington, and Cambridge. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) is helping in the effort to get the new machines up and running and properly configured to meet our growing needs.

7. Aleksey Lim has created a Sugar 0.88-based ppa for Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10). Instructions for using it can be found here: [[Community/Distributions/Ubuntu#Sugar-0.88_on_Ubuntu_9.10_.28karmic.29|0.88 on Karmic]]

 

8. Sebastian Dziallas has been compiling more complete documentation for Sugar on a Stick creation (See [http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/]).

 

9. Bryan Berry announced the Karma Lesson Template, a simple template for creating lessons for the XO and elsewhere (See [http://karmaeducation.org/2010/02/18/introducing-the-karma-lesson-template/]).

===Sugar Labs===

===Sugar Labs===

6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2010-Jan-30-Feb-5-som.jpg]] and [[:File:2010-Feb-6-12-som.jpg]]).

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Feb-13-19-som.jpg).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===