Sugar on a Stick

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Sugar on a Stick, a Sugar Learning Platform
      that you can carry in your pocket.

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Sugar on a Stick Pineapple released 08 November 2011
 


Introduction

Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) is a GNU/Linux distribution that enables children to reclaim computers for themselves in a world of computers made and managed for and by adults. SoaS aims to make it easy for local deployers to provide each student with a thumbdrive (stick) that can be booted into the student's personalized Sugar environment from any machine. Thus, the SoaS project advances in achieving its goal of giving each child in the world access to its free and open source learning environment to create, explore, reflect, and collaborate on any machine—at school, at home, and anywhere there is a suitable computing device.

We dream that Sugar will be a platform that lets people from around the world and from various contexts work together on content, activities, and pedagogy and learn together how to make computers valued, and cost-effective, learning tools.

For general questions, please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for Sugar on a Stick. You can learn more from Walter Bender's interview with Xconomy, Wayan Vota's video and Mike Lee's pictures.


 

What exactly is on the Stick?: Sugar + Fedora GNU/Linux. Taking advantage of Live USB technology, it's possible to store everything you need to run Sugar on a single, USB flash memory stick. Compressed file systems are used to save space, and persistent overlay files are used to save changes to the system and user's files. See our resources page to learn about different component configurations we are designing to offer the option to use virtual machines on existing computers to host Sugar from a portable Stick and save the Sugar Journal (the learner's work) and personal settings on the Stick for use at another workstation.

Project Principles

  • Portability - The Sugar Learner's environment, saved Activities, and collaborations, must be available wherever they have access to suitable computing devices, at home, school, library, clubhouse in order to permit resumable, extended, and deep exploration of concepts and phenomena.
  • Customizability - Deployments, as well as users, should be able to build their own SoaS easily. It is crucial for the success of SoaS to allow modifications and to make the process of creating derivatives as easy as possible.
  • Deployability - SoaS must be easy to deploy. It should take as little effort as possible to get to a working system, both for individual sticks and for collective deployments in computer labs.
  • Local Support - We must encourage and foster the growth of local community involvement in deployments. We must build things in a way that deployers can take over design and construction and fix most of their own problems.

Would you like to help? ...this is entirely a volunteer-run effort. Please get involved!

Getting Sugar on a Stick

Follow the instructions for our most stable, Strawberry release.

Developers and testers can help us debug the v2 Beta test builds. See Sugar on a Stick/Beta.

Please let us know how it goes. You can always get in touch with us!

See these other portable Sugar distributions that share the Sugar on a Stick goals.