Sugar Labs/Current Events

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This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at walterbender.org, and archived here.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)



Sugar Digest

1. I am just back from two weeks on the road. My primary destination was the EduJam event in Montevideo. As you have no doubt already heard, the meeting was very productive: a great opportunity for developers, teachers, and other community members from the region to share ideas—what works and what challenges remain ahead of us. Many thanks for Gabriel Eirea, Gonzalo Odiard, Pablo Flores, Andrés Ambrois, Adam Holt, and everyone else who helped to organize the event. Also, thanks to everyone who took the time to come from near and far—we had participants who travelled from as far away as Siberia in attendance. It really was a community effort.

What struck me above and beyond the passion that the Sugar community has for providing great learning opportunities for children is that we have reached a turning point in the project. While software is never complete—see the discussion below—the bulk of the discussion was not about Python, Forth, or Smalltalk. Rather, it was about how to better utilize the tools we have in the classroom and how to provide support to teachers as they make the transition from instructors to guides and participants in a discovery process. Indeed, even my pre- and post-EduJam meetings at Plan Ceibal were primarily focused on pedagogy rather than technology.

We got some further insight into how Sugar is being used in the classroom from a data-driven presentation given by Plan Ceibal (See [1]). While it was not surprising to see that Browse, Write, and Record were among the most used activities, and that the children enjoy Tuxpaint and games, it was heartening to see that Etoys and Turtle Art are also popular. There was a skew in the statistics between poor, rural schools and more well-to-do urban schools. In the latter, the use of Etoys and Turtle Art was much greater.

We had a discussion about how to best reach out to teachers—for sharing best practice and so I asked if they had any data on where the Uruguayan teachers hang out. (There is lots of material available in our wiki—Valerie Taylor is leading a discussion as to how we can make it more useful to teachers—but apparently the teachers are not finding it. I think we also need to go to where the teachers are rather than expect them to come to us.) Alas, there are no data yet that we can leverage.

The real take-away for me was the growing demand for better channels of communication between teachers and the broader Sugar community.

I gave a talk at the end of the first day of the meeting (my slides are available here) in which I tried to remind everyone that we need to keep our eyes on where we want to go as a community and not to be distracted by short-term quick fixes. Quoting Skip Barber: "You go where you look, so you better look where you want to go." Going to specifics, I made some observations about the Sugar Journal. I reminded everyone that its primary purpose was to be a place of reflection for the learner and that we should not dilute that vision. To drive my point home, I made an analogy to the commit message that is required whenever someone submits a patch to git. We want our learners to compose a "commit message" every time they work on something, thus providing a history of not just what they did, but why they did it. (This "rant" was in response to a recent decision to remove the naming alert from the activity close dialog, where we presented an opportunity to write descriptive text in the Journal.) Sugar is a learning platform and our design and engineering decisions must consider the impact on learning in order that we remain relevant.

2. Speaking of the Journal, one tangible outcome of the evaluation summit held in Cambridge last month was the call for a simple way to make a presentation from Journal entries. While you can use Turtle Blocks to make a "Power Point" presentation, it requires a fair degree of experience. At the Sugar Camp following EduJam I wrote a new activity, Activities/Portfolio, which lets you make a slide show from Journal entries that have been "starred" as favorites. It is easy to use: just star the entries you want included in the presentation and then launch the activity. It presents a sequence of slides that include the Journal entry's title, preview image, and any description written by the learner. It also has an export function to save the presentation as an HTML document that can be shared. Another step towards making "studio thinking" and portfolio assessment part of the Sugar learning experience.

3. I struck gold in a meeting at Plan Ceibal. Mónica Báez arranged for me to meet with her team, which is driving the curriculum development and teacher training for the project. Among them is a math teacher who is responsible to the math teacher-training program and who was really taken with some of Tony Forster's Turtle Block examples and another teacher who is interested in a way to connect art and science; she is specifically interested in having the students interpret data from sensors graphically (along the lines of [2]). At her urging, I fixed some bugs in the SVG export function of Turtle Blocks (patches pushed to git and part of the upcoming v108 release). We also discussed ways to broaden outreach to the community as they see great value in what we are doing.

4. I am going to be giving another talk in Uruguay at the end of the month at Squeakfest. I plan to pick up on a theme I only scratched the surface of at my EduJam talk: that learning software should not be complete. I have discussed this theme in the past in the context of breaking the mindset that learning is a service that can be downloaded. And again within the context of the "There's an app for that" discussion ([3]). But I want to go even further: we should be engaging the learner to always take the next step, whether in creating their own memory game to designing their own abacus to extending Turtle Blocks.

5. I finally met Christofer, the 12-year-old hacker from Uruguay to whom I sent an XO laptop last year. He attended Sugar Camp where Martin Abente taught him how to use git and vi. He and I are going to work on an SVG editor together. Meanwhile, Ignacio, another 12-year-old is helping me with some extensions to the Portfolio project.

6. The children in Uruguay buit their own work-around to the problems with playing Youtube videos on the XO 1.0. The bajaryoutube activity downloads videos to the local machine from which they can be played without interrupts due to memory, processing, and bandwidth issues. "They solve problems and learn that they can solve problems!!"

7. In case you haven't seen it, there is a very nice website for the La Rioja project (See [4]).

8. Meanwhile, good progress is also being made in Paraguay. The Paraguay Educa efforts around Sugar and one-to-one computing have been declared a topic of national interest by the federal government of Paraguay. The recognition of these efforts is especially significant to the Sugar community because of the numerous contributions of code and pedagogy that have come from the Caacupé program.

9. Did you know that there is a Unicode character for the XO man? ⨰ is the character for multiplication with a dot, but it is not a bad short hand to use when typing in plain text.

10. One of the goals of Sugar is to engage young learners in the criticism of ideas. And as I have argued in the past, a love of debate is an aspect of Free Software culture that I hope is transferred to our users. Two weeks ago there was heated debate about software licenses. There are undoubtedly more opinions than licenses (and last time I looked, there were hundreds of licenses to choose from). While the discussion was passionate, for the most part, it as civil: reference to facts, expression of opinion, clarification of terms. We have not yet come to consensus on whether or not we should migrate from GPLv2 to GPLv3, but we are much better informed about the implications and consequences than we were when the discussion began. At the most recent Sugar oversight-board meeting, we agreed to use a referendum to take the pulse of the community (See [5]). Details to follow.

Alas, there was a fork from the main thread where the discussion, while equally passionate, was far from civil. Unsubstantiated accusations of nefarious motivations were made that have no place in our community. “We are not going to be able to do it [meet our challenges] if we spend time vilifying each other. We are not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts.” —Barack Obama

Please continue to express your opinions (which obliges you to do your homework), but we have to have a zero-tolerance policy towards disparaging speech.

In the community

11. Also in Montevideo, at the end of May (26–28), is Squeakfest. The theme for this year's conference is "How and why to use Etoys in Education" (See [6]).

Tech talk

12. Notes from Sugar Camp can be found in the wiki: Todo/EduJAM.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

Visit our planet [7] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

13 Apr 2011 framablogL'expérience Sugar Labs préfigure-t-elle une révolution éducative du XXIe siècle?
05 Apr 2011 BusinesswireThe Government of Peru Expands the One Laptop Per Child Program with Local Manufacturing
31 Jan 2011 SundanceA Day in the Life – Peru
01 Dec 2010 velonationSugar Labs to back Garmin-Cervelo’s development team in unique arrangement
28 Oct 2010 UCRNuevas tecnologías deben estar al alcance de todos los niños y niñas
05 Oct 2010 xconomyOne Ecosystem per Child
08 Sep 2010 FLOSS WeeklySugar Labs
09 Aug 2010 ABC digitalIndicadores constatan el impacto positivo en el aprendizaje de niños
23 Jun 2010 ABC digitalXo para todas las escuelas de Caacupé
21 Jun 2010 La Nacion“Buscamos que los niños no solo usen softwares, sino que puedan crear uno”
20 Jun 2010 UltimaHora.comLa laptop une a padres, alumnos y docentes
15 Jun 2010 The HOLPC XO-1.5 software updated
10 Jun 2010 engadgetSugar on a Stick hits 3.0, teaches us about a new kind of fruit
27 May 2010 Pro Linux DESugar on a Stick v3 freigegeben (German)
27 May 2010 NY TimesOne Laptop Per Child Project Works With Marvell to Produce a $100 Tablet
27 May 2010 PC WorldOLPC Rules out Windows for XO-3
03 May 2010 WXXI: Mixed MediaInterview with Walter Bender (audio)
03 May 2010 Linux MagazineOLPC Computers for Palestinian Refugee Children
14 Apr 2010 National Science FoundationXO Laptops Inspire Learning In Birmingham, Alabama (video)
02 Apr 2010
15 Mar 2010 nbc13.comBirmingham City students opt to spend spring break in class, XO computer camps (video)
18 Feb 2010 LWNKarma targets easier creation of educational software
05 Feb 2010 iprofesionalLa PC barata de Negroponte desembarca en la Argentina para pelear contra Intel
14 Jan 2010 AALFOpen Systems for Broader Change
03 Jan 2010 Educacion 2.0PLAN CEIBAL, El Libro
14 Dec 2009 xconomySugar gets sweeter
10 Dec 2009 Ars TechnicaSugar software environment gets sweeter with version 2
09 Dec 2009 WiredNew Sugar on a Stick Brings Much Needed Improvements
08 Dec 2009 engadgetSugar on a Stick OS goes to 2.0, gets Blueberry coating and creamy Fedora 12 center (video)
07 Dec 2009 Teleread.orgSugar on a Stick: What it means for e-books and education
27 Nov 2009 CNET Japan「コードを見せて、もっと良くなるよ」と言える子どもが生まれる--Sugar Labsが描く未来
16 Nov 2009 zanichellisoftware libero a scuola
12 Nov 2009 opensuse.orgopenSUSE 11.2 Released
07 Nov 2009 My Broadband NewsMandriva 2010 packs a punch [and Sugar]
06 Nov 2009 GhanaWebOpen education and an IT-enabled economic growth in Ghana: Musings of a dutiful citizen
26 Oct 2009 Linux Magazine ESSoftware Libre como apoyo al aprendizaje
09 Oct 2009 interdisciplinesOLPC and Sugar: mobility through the community
08 Oct 2009 IBM developerWorks10 important Linux developments everyone should know about
01 Oct 2009 OLPC FranceInterview Walter Bender au SugarCamp
25 Sep 2009 The InquirerOne Laptop per Child marches on
18 Sep 2009 GroklawThe Role of Free Software in Education
18 Sep 2009 ReutersSugar Labs and Free Software Foundation Celebrate Software Freedom Day
17 Sep 2009 ICTDev.orgDream Again with One Laptop per Child
26 Aug 2009 LatinuxAzúcar en una memoria USB
03 Aug 2009 Wired: Geek DadInventing a New Paradigm: SugarLabs and the Sugar UI
30 Jul 2009 ZanichelliSugar on a Stick: imparare insieme
23 Jul 2009 Everything USBRecycleUSB.com - Donate your Flash Drives for a Good Cause
22 Jul 2009 OLPC FranceSugar : mauvaise presse et mise au point
13 Jul 2009 Spiegel OnlineDas zuckersüße Leichtbau-Linux
07 Jul 2009 ComputerWorldUKGran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts
06 Jul 2009 Windows ForestUSBメモリなどから“OLPC”用のOSを利用できる「Sugar on a Stick」が無償公開
02 Jul 2009 Howard County LibrarySugar on a Stick
27 Jun 2009 DeutschlandfunkSüßes für die Kleinen: Sugar ist Linux speziell für Kinder (in Deutsch)
26 Jun 2009 EduTechSugar on a stick, and other delectables (praise for the lowly USB drive)
26 Jun 2009 Ars TechnicaSugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms
24 Jun 2009 BBCOLPC software to power aging PCs
24 Jun 2009 Technology Review$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
15 Jun 2009 TechSavvyKidsEpisode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
10 Jun 2009 LWN.netSugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
27 May 2009 LWN.netActivities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
27 May 2009 Business WireDailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
01 May 2009 GuysoftNokia N810 Running OLPC Sugar
29 Apr 2009 El MercurioAsí se vivió la fiesta del software libre
27 Apr 2009 ostaticSugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
25 Apr 2009 Free Software MagazineThe Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
24 Apr 2009 Ars TechnicaFirst taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
22 Apr 2009 BetanewsBeta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
27 Mar 2009 Mass High TechGoogle promotes summer open-source internships
18 Mar 2009 MetropolisA Good Argument
16 Mar 2009 Laptop MagazineSugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market WatchSugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DCLearning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomySugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

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