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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

Revision as of 01:47, 30 April 2012

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== Sugar Digest ==
 
== Sugar Digest ==
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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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1. Simon Schampijer and the Sugar Development Team have announced the preliminary release of Sugar 0.96. This development release is a major milestone as it is the first Sugar release to incorporate the Gtk+ 3 toolkit and introspection, better aligning us with the GNOME development community and enhancing our long-term positioning vis-a-vis growth, stability, maintenance, and relevance.
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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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There are some rough edges, as would be expected from such a major effort. Please report bugs!
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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 for 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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New features include a port of the Browse activity to webkit.  
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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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There are [http://build.laptop.org/12.1.0/os8/ OLPC builds] available for testing and Sugar 0.96 in the [http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease Fedora 17 beta].
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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).
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This extraordinary effort began at the [[Marketing_Team/Events/Gtk3_Hackfest_2011|Prague workshop]] organized by Daniel Drake. It was sustained by Simon, Gonzalo, and Manuq, with help from Benjamin, Tomeu, Gary, Raul, Marco, Bert, Martin, Chris, et al. Congratulations and thank you.
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2. Block that metaphor: I am in transit to Korea; my first visit in more than six years. The occasion for this trip is a lecture at the opening of iLab, a new "Media Lab" at Pohang University of Science and Technology. So I am wearing my "former director of the MIT Media Lab" hat rather than my "founder of Sugar Labs" hat. Not that I won't try to inject a little Sugar into my keynote speech.
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It was in Korea, 10 years ago, that I "revealed" the [http://www.media.mit.edu/publications/bttj/ForwardPages5-6.pdf ''Seven secrets of the Media Lab.''], based on the symbols of the seven days of the week in the Chinese calendar: sun, moon, fire, water, wood, gold, and earth. Today, I am recalling four lessons learned -- both at MIT and at Sugar Labs -- based on the cardinal directions: the azimuth of the southern sky* can be used to align goals -- without common goals, we drift apart; the setting sun can be used to align expectations -- mismatched expectations can lead to disappointment regardless of the quality of the work; the rising sun is the source of new light (and new ideas) -- a reminder to invest in community; and the steady northern light is a message to leadership to provide a safe place for taking risks. Many of these lessons were reinforced by my experiences at OLPC and Sugar Labs.
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* Note that since Korea is in the northern hemisphere, the sun peaks in the south.
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3. I get a lot of coding done on airplanes. What I have been experimenting with lately are: (1) some work related to the Gtk-3 port -- lots of little tweaks; (2) some enhancements regarding touch -- in Turtle Art, Abacus, and Dimensions (AKA Visual Match); and (3) different approaches to help -- specifically, I've revamped the introductory animation in [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4246 Dimensions]. Please try the latter and let me know if you find it useful.
    
=== In the community ===
 
=== In the community ===
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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-April-21-27-som.jpg|'''2012 Apr 21st-27th''' (20 emails)
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File:2012-Mar-24-30.jpg|2012 Mar 24th-30th (6 emails)
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File:2012-April-14-20-som.jpg|'''2012 Apr 14th-20th''' (15 emails)
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File:2012-March-17-23-som.jpg|2012 March 17th-23rd (17 emails)
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File:2012-Apr-7-13-som.jpg|'''2012 Apr 7th-13th''' (13 emails)
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File:2012-Mar-31-Apr-6-som.jpg|'''2012 Mar 31st-Apr 6th''' (14 emails)
 
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