10,505
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 5:
Line 5: − 1. Sugar Labs has been given 8 slots for student interns for [http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013 Google Summer of Code]. This means we'll be able to cover a lot of ground this summer: we have some very strong proposals and a great mentoring team. The next step is for the mentors and the sugar-devel team to narrow the applicants down to a short list. Many thanks to everyone who has lent a hand so far and to Google for giving us this opportunity.+ − 2. The sugar-devel team has been really busy pushing new features for the next release and doing a general clean up of the code base. It is remarkable the current pace of activity, especially around the efforts to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class approach to Sugar activity development. You can follow the work on the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/ devel list] or by reviewing (and submitting) patches on [http://github.com/sugarlabs github].+ − 3. I've been trying to contribute to the overall Sugar effort, but I tend to get distracted by Turtle Blocks (AKA Turtle Art). When I was visiting RIT a few weeks back, I was inspired to enhance the debugging features of Turtle Blocks. I came up with a simple way to introduce the concept of break-points to the code. I had already introduced blocks to "hide" and "show" the program as it executes. And through the "rabbit" and "snail" buttons, the user can control the speed of program execution. What I did was to combine these two concepts. By introducing a "hide" block into your code, the code executes at full speed. Introducing a "show" block causes the program to run slowly and display the status of all of its "variables" as it runs. A subtle change, but what it allows one to do is to surround code you want to debug with a "show" and "hide" blocks. Small blocks of code can be examined while the larger program runs at full speed. Really helpful for debugging complex projects.+ − 4. I am also working on another new feature, this one at the request of the teachers who have been using Butia in Uruguay. The idea is to be able to save a stack of blocks for reuse in multiple projects (instances). The way to do that currently is to open a project, copy the stack to the clipboard, and then paste it into a new project -- too clumsy to be used on a regular basis. The new feature allows users to save a stack to a custom palette. This palette is loaded with each instance of Turtle, so it means the stacks are available as if they were extensions of Turtle itself. It makes it even easier for end-user customization.+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + − 5. We'll be celebrating International Turtle Art Day (Día Mundial de TortugArte) in October. Our objectives are to:+ − * Promote the use of Turtle Art − * Share and promote best practices − * Celebrate projects for children and teachers − Details on how you can participate will be made available soon. − − 6. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIDEuYyplc&feature=em-share_video_user How embarrassing]. − 7. Laura Vargas reports that [http://pe.sugarlabs.org/go/Proyecto_Piloto_Hexoquinasa/Instalar Hexoquinasa v0.9] (BETA2) has been released and is in the hands of the Ministry of Education of Perú, where it will undergo testing.+ + + + + + + + − 8. Daniel Narveaz reports that "the initial bits of the HTML activities work has landed. It should now be relatively easy to start writing an activity."+ − :(1) You will need the latest [http://sugarlabs.org/~buildbot/docs/build.html Sugar development environment].+ − − make shell − cd source − :(3) Create an activity based on a template: − volo create my-activity ./sugar-html-template − :(4) Install the activity for development as usual: − cd my-activity − python setup.py dev − − volo add -f ../sugar-html-core/ − Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.+
→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies. They are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. --Jacob Bronowski
1. It has been a long while since my last post. Too much travel. I started writing this post sitting at the gate in Tel Aviv, waiting for my flight to New York to depart. (My second overnight flight in three days.) Since then, I have also been to Sydney and back (for the second time in two months).
Two things brought me to Tel Aviv: the Shaping the Future conference on educational technology and the possibility of a Sugar deployment in the Negev.
The conference, sponsored by CET [http://cet.org.il] was very stimulating. I hung out in the policy track to try to get an insight into the government decision-making process. Not sure I came away with any new ideas, but I did make some new friends, including former governor Bob Wise from West Virginia. The governor knows Idit Harel, whose MamaMedia group contributed some early apps [http://www.mamamedia.com/] to Sugar. He is presently President, Alliance for Excellent Education [http://www.all4ed.org]. I was impressed by his pragmatism.
CET itself is quite impressive in the degree to which they mix deep thinking about pedagogy with practical development of learning materials. Many thanks to my hosts, Gila, Avi, and Cecelia. They will be involved in whatever ends up happening in the Negev. It is looking as if it will be an Android tablet deployment, so they are hoping to pull together a team to help the Sugar community to accelerate its efforts to get Sugar (or a Sugar-like experience) running on Android. Stay tuned.
I met up with Claudia Urrea and Gonzalo Odiard in Sydney. We spend five days with Rangan Srikhanta and the OLPC AU team. The first day we visited a school in the outskirts of Sydney that is using Sugar. I was thrilled to see the children engaged in problem solving, using the computer as a tool, working in small groups in the classroom, each group self-directed. No babysitting with rote-learning games.
At the OLPC AU office, we spent several days brainstorming about ways to add value to the overall program in Australia, which goes beyond distributing hardware and software to providing training, support, and sharing of resources. It is a program with great potential.
One highlight was meeting Ian Mackie, who is deeply invested in the prosperity of the indigenous peoples of Australia. He is excited about the prospects of getting local language support into Sugar. I have connected him with Chris Leonard.
I also got to spend some time with a former student, Vadim Gerasimov, who is working for Google in Sydney. Vadim is helping me with a GDrive webservice for Sugar. We have a command-line version working and I hope to have it integrated into Sugar in short order.
2. During my blogging hiatus, Google Summer of Code began. Our Google Summer of Code students are Kalpa, Marion, Rahul, Suraj, Akshit, Anna, Casey, and Erik. We have a group meeting every Friday at 13:00 EST on #sugar-meeting. Please join us.
3. I neglected to mention that Sugar Labs has received about 200 USB keys from the Recycle USB program [] run by Nexcopy []. My plan is to distribute these keys (with Sugar installed) on Turtle Art Day, which is scheduled for 12 October.
=== In the community ===
=== In the community ===
4. The RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC) is pleased to announce that a student-led project entitled “Sky Time” has been selected for inclusion in the White House Champions of Change event on July 23rd in Washington, D.C. [http://foss.rit.edu/skytime-whitehouse].
=== Tech Talk ===
=== Tech Talk ===
5. A few months back, George Hunt announced the release of XSCE 0.3 [http://schoolserver.org/0.3]:
* XSCE now runs on the XO-1.5,XO-1.75 and XO-4.
* Modular Architecture: cleanly integrate extendable services.
* XSCE runs on the XOs' current OS 13.1.0 (we discovered some wrinkles with 13.2.0 which push its use off to the next release)
* Moodle is Back!
* Content filtering via openDNS.com
* Script for formatting of SD cards, and integration into system for content sto
rage and memory extending swap file (does not work on XO4's)
Since then, there has been another School Server code sprint (hosted by Jerry Vonau) documented here [https://www.facebook.com/UnleashKids].
6. We are making much progress on the road to the Sugar 0.100 (1.0) release. Daniel Narveaz and Manuel Quiñones continue pushing forward on the HTML5/Javascript support [http://developer.sugarlabs.org/web-architecture.md.html]. Suraj has been blogging about his efforts [http://surajgillespie123.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/gsoc/]. I spent the weekend writing my first JS Sugar activity [http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/ConnecttheDots-1.xo]. Lots to learn.
:(2) Then open a shell and move to the source directory:
:(5) To interact with the platform you will need to add the sugar-core-html library to your activity:
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
7. Please visit (and contribute to) our planet [http://planet.sugarlab.org].
== Community News archive ==
== Community News archive ==