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Line 5: − + − 2. At the urging of Manuel Kaufmann I added a long-overdue feature to the Measure Activity: the ability to tune instruments. Guzman Trindad, a teacher in Uruguay, has been giving me feedback in this development. I think we have a pretty decent tool in Version 41 [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4197]. It lets you select a note by name or frequency or instrument and displays a tuning line on the frequency-base scale. It also provides a read out of whether or not you are flat, sharp, or in tune. More details are available on the [[Activities/Measure|Measure Activity home page]].+ − 3. I had a nice meeting with Teemu Leinonen from Alto University last week. Teemu was in town for a conference, where he was presenting his work on TeamUp [http://teamup.aalto.fi/], a really nice classroom collaboration project. It is a web based tool for recording the progress of teams working on group projects. I was inspired to write a new activity to enable groups of learners to pool their efforts and record shared audio notes. Think of it as Portfolio shared among multiple users. While still a work in progress: I hope to have a preliminary release later in the week.+ − 4. Daniel Drake has announced the first release candidate of the new 12.1.0 software release for the XO. It features Sugar 0.96 running on Fedora 17. Details can be found on wiki.laptop.org [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/12.1.0]. Quick links for download are:+ − * XO 1.75 [http://download.laptop.org/xo-1.75/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/] − * XO 1.5 [http://download.laptop.org/xo-1.5/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/] − * XO 1.0 [http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/12.1.0-14/] − 5. Daniel Francis, a youth from Uruguay, has joined Developer Team meetings and will be mentored by Sascha Silbe in reviewing patches to Sugar itself. A nice example for other aspiring contributors.+ − 6. Chris Leonard and Simon Schampijer report that Glucose 9.96 branches have been created in Gitorious and matched on Pootle for the beginning of the 0.97>0.98 cycle.+ − 7. Irma Alvarez and Edgar Quispe continue to make progress on Quechua and Aymara. Meanwhile, there seems to be renewed interest in Maori. Please contact Chris if you have interest in contributing to these (or any other of our language projects).+ − 8. Sugar Labs is funding Manuel Quiñones airfare to GUADEC for a GTK3 hackfest with Simon Schampijer and Carlos Garnacho. OLPC is picking up his other expenses. We anticipate good synergy between the Sugar team and the GNOME 3 community and a boost to our efforts in migrating to GTK-3.+ − 9. Daniel Narvaez, with help from Bernie Innocenti, has gotten a buildbot running. Nightly build results from the sugar core can be found at [http://buildbot.sugarlabs.org].+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + − +
→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
1. The last few weeks, I have been working with Cynthia Solomon, one of the inventors of Logo, who has been giving me great feedback on Turtle Art. She has mostly focused on Turtle Art Mini [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4298] (the version that most closely parallels Brian Silverman's Turtle Art project). At her suggestion, I have enhanced the named action block and named box block: when you create a named stack, a new block appears on the palette for that action; similarly, when you name a box, a new block appears on the palette for accessing that block. I really like the simplicity with which this enables one to extend the block library of Turtle Art.
1. I've spent much of the week working on Turtle Art. At the urging of Cynthia Solomon, I decided to make some visual changes to some of the blocks, in an effort to make it a bit easier to follow program flow. To that end, I changed the way the flow block work. For example, the Repeat block had an overhang to the right below which you could stack blocks that would be repeated. Once the repeating was complete, flow continued on to blocks attached to the bottom of the repeat block. I've often seen people confused by this: they have been uncertain where to attach the blocks to repeat and have had to use vertical-spacer blocks to make their programs less cluttered. In the new look, the Repeat block has a clamp (or jaws) that surround the blocks to repeat and it auto-expands, eliminating the need to use vertical-spacer blocks. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words. In addition to Repeat, there are new blocks for Forever, If-then, If-then-else, While, Until, and, from the Extras palette, the Collapse block. The latter is useful for collapsing a large stack of blocks into a single brick.
[[File:New-TA-Repeat-block.png|300px]]
2. Stephen Jacobs sent a pointer to the projects his students at RIT have done this year:
* [[Quilt]] is a chat system designed for mesh networks. It was written in Python and uses Zeromq as a way to pass data between nodes. Each node connects to other nodes and allows a user to chat. The end goal is to have a resilient chat network that auto discovers nodes on a mesh network.
* [[PyCaveExplorer]] is designed to teach children basic electronics by having them explore randomly generated, grid-based caves. The goal is to create a lit path from the starting tile to the goal tile by placing lights, batteries, and connecting pieces of wire. The base educational goal is to teach how simple circuits work, along with the differences between series and parallel circuits, and the relationship between a power source and the number of things connected to it.
* In [[Point-and-Click-Arthur]], the player is Arthur's Royal Detective. The goal is retrieve all the knights who are in the middle of their most famous quests for a banquet at Camelot. The game is a "point and click" game in the same vein as Monkey Island and King's Quest. The user reads dialog, hunts for an item on screen, and figures out who to use the item on. This causes a reaction and new areas open, etc.
3. I had blogged about a meeting with Teemu Leinonen from Alto University last week and had mentioned that I was working on a new activity inspired by [http://teamup.aalto.fi/ TeamUp]. The beta version of [[Activities/Bulletinboard|Bulletin Board]] is ready for testing. It is quite simple: think of it as Portfolio shared among multiple users. Starred entries in your Journal are shared, along with an audio recording.
4. Danishka Navin reports from Sri Lanka that next month, another remote school will be running Sugar on [http://www.hanthana.org/ Hanthana Linux].
5. Meanwhile, Sameer Verma has been having some [http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/ adventures] on the sub-continent.
6. Hilaire Fernandes of [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4561 DrGeo] fame shared [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrupz0_1310-programmed-sketch-rulers_tech a cool video] of some of the things you can do. Worth checking out.
7. Daniel Narvaez announced that he has released a new sugar-build that should make it pretty easy to build Sugar on most GNU/Linux systems (tested on the latest Fedora and Ubuntu systems).
git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-build/sugar-build.git
cd sugar-build
make build
make run
Don't forget to read the README file.
8. Last week Bert Freudenberg announced a [http://etoys.squeak.org/download/ release candidate] for Etoys 5.0.1. Please help with testing.
9. Reuben Caron announced the [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/11.3.1 final release of OLPC OS 11.3.1] for XO-1, XO-1.5 and as a formal release for XO-1.75. Details are available at [12].
10. Meanwhile, Daniel Drake announced another [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/12.1.0 candidate release of 12.1.0]. Please help test this build as well.
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
== Community News archive ==
== Community News archive ==