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Sugar Digest 2008-08-25

Sugar Digest

1. Vote early and often: There is one more week to cast your ballot in the Sugar Oversight Board election. The Selectricity server was (unexpectedly) down for maintenance this past weekend; if you had trouble accessing the server, please try again.

2. Minsky on learning: On the flight to Austin this weekend, I was rereading Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine; I came across this inspiring quote: “We like to think that a child’s play is unconstrained—but when children appear to feel joyous and free, this may merely hide from their minds their purposefulness; you can see this more clearly when you attempt to drag them away from their chosen tasks. For they are exploring their worlds to see what’s there, making explanations of what those things are, and imagining what else could be; exploring, explaining and learning are among a child’s most purposeful urges and goals. The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have. Never again in those children’s lives will anything drive them to work so hard.”

Community jams and meetups

3. Book sprint: We are in the midst of a week-long book sprint, with the goal of creating manual for Sugar. Please follow our progress at Floss Manuals and feel free to create an account and help with writing, illustrating, or editing.

4. Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores is spreading the word about the upcoming Ceibal Jam in Uruguay (30 August and 6 September). Ceibal Jam is a social movement independent of voluntary and open membership, which seeks nuclear everyone who has an interest in contributing to the development of software with potential usefulness for the Plan Ceibal, is an effort to develop local capacity to create new applications and modify Existing to address the specific needs of the Uruguayan reality. On the occasion of this second jam, introductory workshops will be conducted to programming for computers XO Plan Ceibal, targeted audiences with different levels of knowledge, while also submitted development projects under way and will form groups to work during the days in different proposals programming (Please see mediagala.com). The meeting is sponsored by the Catholic University of Uruguay, Larrobla & Associates and Artech (Additional information is available at Ceibal Jam).

5. Learning Content: On Sunday, 31 August, at 4PM, OLPC will be hosting a public meeting to discuss (Please see OLPC Physics):

  • Great teachers have great content they’ve spent their lifetime developing—how can they contribute to OLPC/Sugar?
  • How can engineers help teachers get set projects into motion?
  • How can we together help with the transition from paper and pencil to Sugar and computing?
  • What learning strategies are OLPC working on?

Presentors:

  • Caryl Bigenho, longtime teacher and senior OLPC support volunteer
  • Brian Jordan, OLPC Intern, author of Physics Activity (User:Bjordan)
  • David Cavallo, OLPC VP Learning

Tech Talk

6. Watch out your teeth! Simon Schampijer and the release team are happy to announce the final release of Sucrose 0.82 (See Sucrose 0.82 discussion). Sucrose 0.82 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform, consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities. Sucrose is released every six months; the new release contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations.

There are extensive release notes (Please see Sucrose 0.82 Release Notes). Also, please refer to the roadmap for our next release (Roadmap Schedule) and join in the discussion of the upcoming 0.84 release (Sucrose Roadmap 0.84).

Many people contributed to this release, including those who helped with testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.

I’d like to give special thanks to Simon for managing our most well organized release to date. He has set the bar high for future Sugar release managers.

7. Embedded Sugar: David Farning has been leading a discussion about building an embedded-Sugar community. A group of developers have been assembled to port Sugar to the beagleboard. They plan to use the Open Embedded toolkit, which is both a cross-compiler and an embedded package-management system. The team will be using BeagleBoardSugar as a point of collaboration as well as the beagleboard google group mailing list (beagleboard).

8. Measure 19: Arjun Sarwal has release a new version of the Measure activity (Measure-19.xo); please send Arjan feedback as there are extensive changes and enhancements.

Sugar Labs

9. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 25 August 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-08-18

Sugar Digest

1. Elections: The US presidential election is not the only opportunity to organize for change. The polls are open for the Sugar Labs oversight board (The list of candidates can be found at candidates list). Polls close on 31 August 2008.

2. 0.82: Simon Schampijer reports that Sucrose 0.82 has been released (Please see Sucrose 0.82 for details and documentation). Many thanks to the release team and our community contributors. They’ve done a great job.

3. 0.84 goals: Marco Pesenti Gritti has begun a discussion thread about our goals for the 0.84 release (Please join the discussion, which is archived at 0.84 Goals discussion). The list currently includes:

  • Next generation journal
  • File sharing
  • Group view/bulletin board
  • Collaboration scalability
  • Responsive UI
  • Stable activities API
  • Official Sugar LiveCD
  • Compatibility with desktop applications
  • Quality and reliability

Please also see 0.84 Goals.

4. Constuctionism: The discussion around a succinct definition of Constructionism has heated up again (Please see Concise definition of Constructionism). While there is consensus that Sugar Labs should not be advocating just “one right way” to learn, a concise explanation of the learning opportunities exposed and enhanced by the Sugar learning platform would go a long ways towards getting more educators engaged in the discussion. We also would benefit from documenting some tangible results from the field that can serve as exemplars.

This second wave of discussion began with Seth Woodworth dredging up the Media Lab’s Future of Learning group’s definition of Constructionism (this is the group founded by Seymour Papert):

We are developing “Constructionism” as a theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of “construction.” It is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information “poured” into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).

The above definition does not sufficiently distinguish Constructionism from “open-ended discovery” for the casual reader. Bill Kerr followed up with a discussion of Cynthia Solomon’s book, Computer Environments for Children, in which she discusses four models of learning:

  • Suppes: Drill and Practice and Rote Learning
  • Davis: Socratic Interactions and Discovery Learning
  • Dwyer: Eclecticism and Heuristic Learning
  • Papert: Constructivism and Piagetian Learning

Martin Langhoff hit the nail on the head when he asked, “How do we make this useful for teaching?”

What does Sugar offer in terms of affordances that can make a positive impact in (and out of) the classroom? The key in my mind is that Sugar facilitates collaboration (and critique); reflection (through the Journal); and discovery, through its clarity of design and roots in FOSS.

Community jams and meetups

5. Book sprint: The FLOSS Manuals Sugar/XO book sprint begins Sunday in Austin, TX (Details are available at Austin Book Sprint).

Tech Talk

6. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports an updated version of the XO LiveCD (Please download it from ftp LiveCD). This release is based on Joyride 2282; it demonstrates many new Sugar features and updated activities.

7. Firefox: C. Scott Ananian has made Firefox 3 available via software-update (Please see firefox-activity).

Sugar Labs

8. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 18 August 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

Sugar Digest 2008-08-11

Sugar Digest

1. Worth a read: Dave Farning sent a pointer to an Open University report on “the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning community in formal educational settings” (Please see FLOSSCOM Phase 2 Report). While the focus is on higher education, what I found of particular relevance is the discussion of collaboration and reflection in FOSS projects and its potential transfer to the classroom.

Community jams and meetups

2. Game Jam Peru: Hernán Paches announces an upcoming Game Jam at the Universidad de San Martín de Porres in Lima on 23–25 October.

Tech Talk

3. Sucrose final release: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar community is working on the final release (0.82) for the Sucrose (Please see the Sugar Timeline]).

4. Dr. Geo: Hilaire Fernandes is looking for feedback on some screencasts he has been preparing to explain the DrGeo features (Please see DrGeo screencast).

5. “Hard fun”: Mark Goadrich and his student Nolan Baker are seeking feedback on three educational games (COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell Management) they have been developing for Sugar this summer (Please see COBBLE; Space Tag; and Cell Management).

6. x2o: Alex Levenson reports the first release of x2o, a physics problem solving game in which you create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to get the O to land on top of the X (Please see X2o).

7. Sugar-presence-service: Guillaume Desmottes reports that a new release of the Suagr Presence Service is available (Please see sugar-presence-service-0.82.1.tar.bz2). This is the “Woo I’m stable!” release.

8. Activity updates: Read 49; Terminal 15; Log 12; Pippy 24; Calculate 21; Etoys 87; Write 57; Browse 95; and Journal 97.

9. Wine: John Gilmore is seeking feedback as to what class of MS-Windows programs would be of high-priority for Sugar users. (Please see Sugared Wine for more information about Wine, a GNU LGPL licensed implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix and Sugar).

10. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports “significant support” for 18 languages (not including English) for Sugar 0.82:

Language % of translated strings
Greek 100
Sinhala 100
Turkish 100
Dutch 99
German 99
Kinyarwanda 98.5
Spanish 97.5
Nepali 97.5
Italian 97
Kreyol 97
Marathi 96.5
Mongolian 95.5
French 95
Telugu 94
Urdu 93.5
Slovenian 82.5
Dari 80
Pashto 80

Thanks to all the translation teams for their hard work.

Sugar Labs

11. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). Sugar and Work are surrounded by OLPC, lab, education, development, and community.

Posted 11 August 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

Sugar Digest 2008-08-05

Sugar Digest

1. “The vision thing”: There has been some discussion about the Sugar vision in regard to both its clarity and the degree to which it is being promoted (Please see the email thread). While there is some divergence of opinion about the breadth of the Sugar Labs mission—ranging from a strict focus on collaboration tools to a broad focus on everything necessary for successful one-laptop-per-child deployments—there was consensus that we are getting the message out that Sugar is alive and kicking; there is still a wide-spread impression that the FOSS community has abandoned Sugar because OLPC is working with Microsoft on Windows XP. We need to let the world know that: (a) there is a vibrant Sugar community; (b) that OLPC is still behind Sugar; (c) other hardware vendors are beginning to adopt Sugar; and (d) the FOSS Sugar learning platform offers encourages the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, graphics, etc.—they are able to engage in debugging both their personal expression and the very tools that they use for that expression.

2. Try Sugar: An important aspect of Sugar outreach is easy access to Sugar itself. We are targeting grassroots adoption (in addition to top-down “sales” coupled to programs like One Laptop per Child or Intel regional or national initialives), so we need to make it easier for small groups to try Sugar. This includes community support of the existing LiveUSB, LiveCD, and Appliance efforts, but also further consideration (and documentation) of the various hardware one might find in the field and more detailed instructions on setting up classrooms (groups) of machines working together. Towards that end, we are beginning work on a “Try Sugar” section in the wiki (Please help us flesh out the Try Sugar page), which includes a matrix of “tried and ready” solutions from the field. To be able to say to a teacher, here is a step-by-step guide to how you can repurpose (or overlay) the computers you have access to in the classroom to run Sugar will go a long way towards fostering growth of Sugar.

3. “Unexpected” suggestions: Michael Stone wrote up some suggestions regarding “the Work of Sugar”, his reactions to sugar’s architecture, design, and implementation. It was the basis of an in-depth discussion the Sugar mailing list (Please see [1]).

4. Proposal: There has been a back-and-forth discussion about establishing an Activity developers mailing list separate from the Sugar developers mailing list (Please see [2]). It has been suggested that Activity developers need a more focused list to alert them to needs specific to activity developers, such as changes to APIs, a forum for soliciting help, etc. The downside of course is the fragmentation and distraction of yet another mailing list.

5. Outreach: Stormy Peters, executive director, GNOME Foundation, has blogged about Sugar Labs (Please see Stormy’s Corner) and has pledged to step up the level of awareness of Sugar within the GNOME community. (Sugar has its foundation in the GNOME toolkit.) Morgan Collett has been actively promoting Sugar within the Ubuntu community and Greg DeKoeningsberg has been very helpful in promoting Sugar within the Fedora community.

6. Minutes: We had a meeting of the acting Sugar oversight board on Friday, 8 August 2008. Minutes and a log of the conversation are in the wiki (Please see 1 August 2008 minutes). One important decision reached at the meeting was to open up nominations for positions on the to-be-elected seven-member board over the first two weeks of August (until the 16th) and to hold an election over the final two weeks of August (from the 17th to the 30th). Please send nominations to “walter AT sugarlabs.org”; feel free to nominate yourself.

Community jams and meetups

7. Openminds: Is anyone planning to attend the K–12 Openminds meeting in Indianapolis (Please see [3])? It’d be a great forum to promote Sugar.

8. Physics jam: Brian Jordan is organizing a physics game competition 29–31 August in Cambridge, MA. There will be categories for remote entries, youth, professional, and independent game developers. Brian reports that will be XOs and other sweet prizes for the best entries. Please help to spread the word (Please see Physics Jam).

9. Organización del 2do Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores reports that there will be a jam at the Catholic University (UCU) in Uruguay over two weekends (Saturday 30 August and 6 September). Please contact Pablo (”pflores2 AT gmail.com”) for more details.

10. Book sprint: There will be a book sprint in Austin, TX from 24–29 August. Please contact Adam Hyde (”adam AT flossmanuals.net”) for more details.

Tech Talk

11. Buildbot: Marco Pesenti Gritti reports that we are running periodic builds of Sugar using the buildbot automation system. Full builds, which starts every time from a clean source and installation tree, are run every 12 hours. Quick builds, which are built incrementally from the last build source and installation tree, are run every two hours. The status of the builds is available through a web interface and failures are notified to the development mailing list (Please see Buildbot). Thanks to prgmr.com for hosting the buildbot for us.

Next steps:

  • Setup other Linux distributions (does anyone want to work on an Ubuntu “slave”?);
  • Make the check step succeed (several pylint warnings to address);
  • Automated testing (maybe we can start integrating bits of Zach work?);
  • Enable mail notification on failures.

12. Activity updates: A number of activity developers reported new versions available this week for testing: Please try the new versions of:

  • Chat 44
  • Journal 96
  • Terminal 14
  • Pippy 23
  • Read 48
  • Calculate 20
  • Write 56
  • Develop 34
  • Etoys 80
  • Conozco Uruguay (”I know Uruguay”)

13. Sucrose 0.81.6: Simon Schampijer reports that the new Sucrose 0.81.6 Development Release (Release Candidate 2) is out. This release cycle was focused on stabilization. Thanks to all of you for your efforts and special thanks to the translation teams, whom have been very busy of late: all the Fructose modules have been released containing new strings. Release notes are available at Sucrose 0.81.6 and the Sucrose Roadmap is available at Roadmap.

Sugar Labs

14. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM.jpg). While it has been a fairly quiet traffic week, there has been an educational focus (how to best use/apply/approach technology tools to education). Gary also posted a map of the Sugar mailing list from the month of July (Please see Sugar SOM).

Posted 05 August 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

A page from the Hilbert playbook

In June, I gave a talk, “Confessions of a fundamentalist”, at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The first half of the talk was reported in two separate articles in OLPC News. (Please see Part 1 and Part 2.)

I had promised to blog the second half of the talk, which was called, “A page from the Hilbert playbook.”

In 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems in mathematics that were very influential to 20th century mathematics. Subsequently, variants of this device has been used to draw attention to additional challenges in mathematics and in other disciplines. While I am no certainly no Hilbert, I use the device here to draw attention to a number of problems—perhaps not as intractable as the Riemann hypothesis—facing the intervention of technology on learning (still in draft form):

Computer Science:

(1) How does one build an efficient, scalable, affordable community network? (802.11s is not yet the solution and may never be.) How do we efficiently connect these local networks to the global network?

(2) Are there scalable architectures for software development such that one can reach towards complexity while maintaining a level of simplicity so as to not be unapproachable for the uninitiated? Can these architectures be open to local development and yet, within reason, secure to malware? Can these architectures be reasonably efficient?

(3) Is there a better distributed fully-persistent versioned file system? And a better flash file system?

(4) Are there more efficient means of internationalization and localization? We need to scale these efforts by three orders of magnitude in order to reach every corner of the planet.

(5) Can we design a more symmetric global content distribution system, so that people everywhere are on a more equal footing as both creators and consumers of content?

Engineering:

(6) Can we develop low-power computing and alternative power systems?

(7) Can we develop low-cost computing (and buck industry’s predilection for marketing bigger and faster systems to no purpose)?

(8) Can we build environmentally-robust computing?

Education:

(9) Can we validate methods that lead to fluency, such as “scaffolding” in support of “learning through doing” at scale and across disciplines? (We still have many open questions about learning: How well do we understand mastery? How well do we understand understanding? How do we measure what we value instead of value what we can measure?)

(10) Is school reform possible (in our lifetimes)? Are there systemic approaches to overcoming the systemic barriers to change?

(11) How can we unleash the teacher in the classroom and in each of us?

(12) Are there new tools for collaboration, critique, and meaningful evaluation? (There lessons the education community can learn from the FOSS community.)

(13) How can we engaging the local, regional, and global communities to help? Are there any other ways to scale such that every child has an opportunity for a quality learning experience.

Economics:

(14) What are the best models for the governance of volunteer communities?

(15) Are there new economic models for schooling?

(16) What are the micro-economics of learning? Of support? Of economic development?

(17) Is it possible to validate the hypothesis that learning (coupled with freedom of thought) leads to economic development?

(18) Are there better models of FOSS economic (and technological) impact?

Social Sciences:

(19) How will we cope with a switch in the balance of knowledge and knowledge creation? How does this impact local culture and social norms?

(20) What does it mean for a child to create content from both legal and cultural perspectives?

(21) Who should pay for learning? Is it a basic human right? Is it a means to combat poverty and the other root causes of social unrest?

(22) What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe?

(23) How can open-content programs such as Open Courseware be expanded? Should contribution to a knowledge commons be the de rigour for universities?

Learning Learning

These problems are beyond the scope of any one organization—many in fact are by their very nature global. I propose that we establish a “Learning Learning consortium” with a mission to supporting universal access to innovative quality education worldwide. It would engage universities around the world to take action. (We have many “think tanks” but far too few “action tanks”.)

Two universities in Peru are giving students a semester of course credit to spend time in the field in support of their country’s learning initiative. (Pairs of students—one from education and one from engineering—are spending time in schools throughout the most rural regions of the country, observing, supporting, and spreading best practices.) This is but one example of how universities can get involved. We need to invent many more ways, put them into practice, evaluate them, and share the ones that work.

Universities need to use their power to convene—bringing the best and brightest minds to these questions.

Posted 31 July 2008 † admin § learning ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-07-28

Sugar Digest

1. Award-winning: We can start referring to Sugar as “award-winning software.” It earned a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards ‘08 and was undoubtedly one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 laptop won the gold medal (Please see IDEA Awards).

2. Outreach: Dave Farning has been developing a road map for outreach to various communities (apparently we already have the attention of the design community; maybe our next award will be from the education community). Specifically, he suggests that we:

  • Engage the package maintainers for the various Linux distributions<\li>
    • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;<\li>
    • Help build a community within each distribution to packages Sugar and Sugar Activities;<\li>
    • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.<\li>
  • Engage education-focused distributions<\li>
    • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;<\li>
    • Make sure they are aware of the Sugar packaging efforts (either .deb or .rpm);<\li>
    • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.<\li>
  • Engage the education community<\li>
    • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;<\li>
    • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators;<\li>
    • Help expand the community to include development of pedagogy; models of use; etc.<\li>

Dave reports our progress to date:

  • We are working with Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu and are working towards a basic set of stable packages for their distributions;<\li>
  • We are in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with eduction distributions (Please help us);<\li>
  • Outside of the OLPC deployments, we are still in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with education communities (Again, your help is needed here–we want to establish a “bottom-up” approach to compliment the OLPC top-down efforts).<\li>

3. “Congratulations! but Sugar sucks”: As we near code freeze for Sucrose 8.2, Ben Schwartz has identified six areas in need of improvement. In a thread with a somewhat unfortunate subject field, these are discussed as candidate areas we should focus on for the next release (Please see thread). The discussion begs the question of how Sugar Labs can rise above day-to-day deployment headaches in order to ensure that there is a solid foundation being built. A model I have been advocating for Sugar Labs is as the place where the goals and architecture for Sugar are established. The community, of course, vets those goals, critiques the architecture, and provides the means of achieving those goals.

4. “Kid contributions”: John Gilmore started a discussion bemoaning the fact that as far as we know, there have not yet been any patches to Sugar submitted by a child (Please see thread). My response to John was:

  • we need better tools for software development on the XO (Jameson Chema Quinn has been making some progress on the Develop activity—see below);
  • while the children have not yet been making modification to the Sugar codebase, there is evidence of a cultural shift in schools using Sugar that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start.

5. OEMs: Are we ready to start contacting OEMs? (There are a number of new products being announced in the low-cost laptop space. How do we ensure that Sugar is an option for these products?)

6. Physics: Edward Cherlin has proposed we “start a physics textbook project combining Measure, Etoys, SciPy, and all of the low-cost instruments we can come up with” (Please see thread).

Community jams and meetups

7. Physics game jam: Brian Jordangi is organizing a physics game-jam competition in Boston, MA the weekend of August 29.

8. FLOSS Manual sprint: Anne Gentile is organizing an OLPC/Sugar FLOSS Manuals book sprint in Austin, TX at the end of next month.

Tech Talk

9. Sugar-jhbuild: I finally managed to get my xsessions configured so that I could run both Sugar as installed by apt-get sugar and the latest jpyride version I built by hand using sugar-jhbuild (Please see xsession for the details).

10. Sugar appliance: Bryan Kearney has built a Sugar appliance based upon the Thincrust toolkit (Please see Thincrust where you’ll learn that “an appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system bundle”). The directions for using the appliance are:

  1. Download sugarAppliance.tar.gz
  2. Unzip and untar it
  3. Run virt-image sugar.xml
  4. At the login, select “Autologin”

11. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has made a new version of Develop (Please see Develop). Jameson recommends you use a recent Joyride (> 2170).

12. Roadmap updates: Marco Pesenti Gritti announced that letting the code freeze for this release slip. “With the current speed of development of the OLPC release it would just be impractical.” Marco has
started a tentative 0.84 schedule (Please see Roadmap 84).

Marco is finally back working full time on OLPC. He spent this week fixing blocker bugs for the next release, doing a lot of triage and several patch reviews. He implemented an improved logic handling new windows in the Browse activity, which, while not yet ideal, should allow all the web sites that Uruguay has had problems with to work correctly. Marco also tracked down and fixed an infinite loop in the shell. Finally, with Tomeu Vizoso, he solved a problem with the web widget size allocation, which is likely to have caused several problems.

13. Sucrose Release Candidate 1: The new Sucrose 0.81.5 Development Release is out. Thanks to all the contributors! Simon Schampijer reports that we now have one more release before code freeze (excluding more changes to the road map). Please test, give feedback, and file bugs (Please see Sucrose 81.5).

Simon has been implementing a mechanism for feedback from ‘Register’ process in the form of an alert that is displayed in the Home view.

14. Computer vision: Nirav Patel is soliciting feedback regarding what computer vision should it be in regard to “gaming, input, accessibility, education, or anything else” (Please see thread). He gives some examples at Nirav’s blog.

15. Etoys: Takashi Yamamiya reports that there is new release of Etoys, which includes Tubes, a Pango speed-up, and a fix to the clipboard.

Sugar Labs

16. Infrastructure: Bernie Innocenti reports that on Monday, the following services were moved to Solarsail:

  • mailing lists
  • wiki.sugarlabs.org
  • email aliases forwarding

Additional services that we might want to migrate from dev.laptop.org include:

  • git
  • trac
  • the sugar@ mailing list
  • wiki pages related to Sugar
  • pootle

We decided to wait moving these until we get the full backups running and the machine racked in its final home.

Services still hosted by develer.com include:

  • api.sugarlabs.org
  • courses.sugrlabs.org
  • developer accounts
  • nameservers
  • user drop box for downloads.sugarlabs.org

The above services will go on our second machine as soon if we get it racked. Develer is glad to keep them as long as needed.

Thanks to Bernie and Ivan Krstić.

17. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). The verbs are prominent: doing; programming; learning; and education; math; etc.

Posted 28 July 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digert 2008-07-21

1. Oversight: We had a meeting of the acting oversight board (minutes are available here).

2. Infrastructure: Ivan Krstić and Bernie Innocenti have been moving the Sugar Labs back-end infrastructure to a new server hosted at MIT. Please report any problems you may have encountered post-move (One artifact to note: its.an.education.project@tema.lo-res.org will not work. Please change your address book to iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org).

3. “Follow Through”: Chris Leonard has created a wiki page (Lesson Plan Resources) to aggregate collections of lesson plans or curriculum development materials “posted in some dusty corners of the Internet”; they provide potentially useful modules of curricular content (constructionist and instructionist) that can either be adapted or at least serve as examples. Please contribute to the list with your own ideas and feedback on the postings.

Another useful exercise would be to enhance these lesson plans through consideration of everything Sugar has to offer: journaling, collaboration, etc. A few detailed guides would go a long way towards opening the door to others, regardless of where the learning goals come from, generative or handed down from above.

4. From Blog of Project Ceibal: More resources for teachers and learners:

The communities deploying Sugar are beginning to make their materials and learning publicly available. I look forward to seeing some of the wonderful materials created by the team at Inttelmex made public soon.

5. Help wanted: OLPC has a posted job opening for a Sugar UI coder (Please see User Interface Developer for Sugar). There is also interest expressed by numerous parties for help porting Sugar to a number of different Linux-based platforms. Please contact me if you have an interest in such work.

Community jams and meetups

6. Teacher Jam Chicago: July 29, 2008 @ Google Chicago

7. Especially for teachers Uruguayans: A round table and conference of the “Regional Forum Ceibal learn from Digital Content educational and Intelligence” will be held in Montevideo on July 23—25 and will be transmitted live on Gateway Ceibal.

Tech Talk

8. Ubuntu refresh: James Munro, with hep from Morgan Collett, has created a fresh set of Ubuntu Sucrose packages (Please see Ubuntu refresh).

With some help from Marco Pesenti Gritti, I’ve been trying to get my xsession configured on Ubuntu to run from the Joyride build in my home directory (sugar-jhbuild) instead of the build installed from “apt-get sugar”. Not quite working due to some pathname scrambling—hopefully I’ll be able to post instructions soon.

9. Browse: Simon Schampijer released a new xulrunner rpm (xulrunner-1.9-1.olpc3.2) that brings back Sugar- and OLPC-specific patches (e.g., permission patch to work with Bitfrost, no-native theme patch) that were lost when updating to the latest tarball. The layout on many sites were broken without these patches. It is available in Joyride >= 2155. Tomeu Vizoso solved the remaining issues that prevented Google Gears from running on the Browse activity.

10. SocialCalc: Work continues on the spreadsheet; a mailing list has been created to explore the use of spreadsheets in education and rural community development (Please subscribe at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/socialcalc).

11. Geography: A team of students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have just finished developing a world-geography game (Please see RPI Geography Game). Gabriel Eirea is working on “Conozco Uruguay”, an Uruguayan geography educational game. (There are also several GCompris geography games available, thanks to Bruno Coudoin; please see GCompris)

12. SMS: Ankur Verma has built an SMS Gateway that can be accessed by XO through web browser, enabling one to send and receive SMS messages from within Sugar (Please see SMS on XO-1).

13. Physics: Brian Jordan worked on fleshing out OLPC Physics portal page (Please see Physics). He continues to work on the physics activity, having collected advice from teachers and testers, including feedback from the OLPC-Sur list (many of whom are teachers using OLPC in Peru and Uruguay). Bobby Powers continued to work on his system-dynamics activity (Please see Model and Model/Mockups).

14. Play Go: Andrés Ambrois has been working on the PlayGo activity; he has made some patches and done some general cleaning up of the code. He is going to tackle collaboration next (See Play Go).

15. Food Force: Manusheel Gupta reports progress on the Food Force game (Please see Food Force).

  • The artwork better fits with the text display;
  • A messaging system has been developed, making it a more interactive experience.

—-

16. Sugar control panel: Simon added documentation for the graphical control panel (Please see Sugar control panel bugs, such as Ticket #7510.

17. Speech synthesis: Hemant Goyals’s Google Summer of Code project, “Integration of Speech Synthesis in Sugar Environment”, is making great progress, according to Simon, the project supervisor. You can follow the progress at Speech Synthesis in Sugar.

18. Creative Commons: The addition of a Creative Commons (CC) licensing functionality in the Journal was discussed at this week’s Sugar developers meeting (Please see CC licensing).

  1. Eben Eliason will make mock-up by August 15 (Ticket 7551);
  2. Asheesh Laroia will then port the existing interface to incorporate Eben’s mock-up;
  3. after code review, the CC feature will be included

19. Collaboration: Morgan Collett tested a fix for blocker Ticket #7444 (”cannot close a shared activity when the initiator has disconnected”). Elliot Fairweather work on the BuddyInfo interface for telepathy-synapse; he has Cerebro/Synapse enabled buddies appearing in the mesh view (Please see Buddy picture). Guillaume Desmottes made some improvements on “Gadget” integration into Sugar (Gadget is an XMPP server component being developed to scale Jabber-server-based collaborative activities). The presence-service is now able to properly manage buddies and activities from gadget views and update them according Gadget events.

20. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta is testing a new language-pack generation system. New features include:

  • Support for activity.linfo files, which will support the translation of the names of activities;
  • Support for rollback and uninstallation of individual language packs;
  • Support for branches, which will enable support for the various branches within Joyride, e.g., 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and eventually, 9.1.x

21. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar continues his work on the Sugar developer documentation. He has some sample code and instructions on using Pango to render fonts in your Sugar activities as a well as an updated set of steps to internationalize your activity (based on the instructions at Internationalization in Sugar) and his own experience getting text to translate (Please see Sugar Almanac).

22. Tinderbox: Edward Cherlin contacted Luke Crawford, who runs a colocation center in California; Luke has offered Sugar Labs Xen virtual machines for use as tinderboxes. The first test machine, running CentOS, is at sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com. Luke is building a Fedora 9 image for us, which should be ready some time this week. Depending on our needs and his excess capacity, it will be possible to add more machines. Marco offered to take the lead on setting up the tinderboxes.

23. Activity updates: Eben Eliason has been working on tickets relevant to the pending 8.2 release, including new mock-ups for a software update system. Eben has been leading the discussion about activity versioning, which will probably not be resolved until Release 9.1 Tomeu Vizoso added the ability to delete activities from the Home View. C. Scott Ananian worked an activity update control panel (http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4951) inspired by OLPC Austria’s XO-get activity and Bert Freudenberg’s script. Scott requests that activity authors consider adding “update_url” fields to their activity.info files (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles). Brian Jordan wrote a script for pulling an activity from git repositories and creating a symlink from it directly into the Activities folder; this lets you simply git pull the newest versions o fan activities into running in Sugar environment (Please see Activity coop).

24. Developer meetings: Upcoming meetings will have a fixed set of points that are discussed each meeting; additional topics that can be added by the attendees (Please see Sugar development team meeting).

  • updates from the past week (e.g. process changes);
  • Sugar roadmap;
  • review of the latest bugs (for which we need help);
  • introduction of new developers

Additional topics can be added by the developers during the week (Please see How to add topics”. Those of you on the Sugar mailing list should expect to receive three meeting-related messages each week:

  1. Monday: reminder to add_topics
  2. Thursday: meeting reminder
  3. Thursday: minutes from the meeting

25. Release process: Marco Pesenti Gritti, back from vacation, has been spending time thinking about the interaction of the OLPC and SugarLabs release processes; progress is being made, but there is more work to do. We’d like to get this right, as it will only get more complicated as we are working with more vendors and more distributions.

26. 8.2.0 bug fixing: Marco has been busy triaging and diagnosing tickets and reviewing patches for the upcoming 8.2.0 release. (One collection of bugs he dispatched were related to problems with the zoom-level logic in Joyride.)

Sugar Labs

27. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). A prominent theme is mathematics education.

Posted 21 July 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-07-14

While I plan to use this blog more generally, I will be posting the weekly Sugar Digest here. (The Sugar Digest archive can be found here.

Sugar Digest

1. Sugar Labs governance: There are still a few more loose ends to deal with before we are officially members of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In preparation, I’ve made a lot of changes on the governance page. Please comment.

2. Leaning: There were some interesting discussions about learning on the Education list this week:

3. OLPC in the field: Jim Gettys has published an aggregate summary of Sugar in the hands of children in the various OLPC deployments around the world (OLPC news).

4. Clarity: When talking about Sugar, I never have trouble describing the collaboration features or the reflective nature of the Journal, but I struggle with describing the interface in terms of its simplicity. “Simplicity” has an undertone of “dumbed down” and limited capability. In a discussion with Nathan Felde from the Art Institute of Boston, a division of Lesley University, we used the word “clarity”, which immediately struck me as a much better term than simplicity. It doesn’t imply any limit and it suggests transparency and openness, both hallmarks of the interface.

5. Studio Thinking: Nathan also introduced me to a book, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education by Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veneema, and Kimberly M. Sheridan. It is a treatise on visual arts education; the authors argue that through the arts, students learn specific “dispositions of mind” that lead to high-quality thinking. They also speak about “Studio Habits of Mind”: develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand the world and “Studio Structures”: the demonstration/ lecture, students working, and the critique. It seems there is synergy with many of the goals of Sugar. An open question is how to transfer this thinking beyond the visual arts. (See John Broomall’s review)

Tech Talk

6. Release process: Marco Pesenti Gritti and Michael Stone have been discussing how to integrate the Sugar and OLPC release processes:

  • SugarLabs should try to schedule its release a few months before the OLPC release target date (something around 2–3 months). That will give us enough time to ensure everything is stable before we start integrating the new code in the OLPC distribution.
  • Sugar developers employed by OLPC will work on OLPC release contracts for all the new features present in the new release.
  • After the first stable release SugarLabs will keep releasing minor updates, which will include bug fixes and strings for the OLPC release.
  • We should make an effort to develop all the features required as part of the unstable development cycle. Though there surely will be cases where OLPC will need changes outside the normal SugarLabs schedule. We will land these in a limited and controlled way both during the freeze periods and as part of the stable minor releases.

7. Sucrose: Simon Schampijer announced the Sucrose Development Release 0.81.6 this week (Sucrose). You can test it in OLPC joyride >= 2129.

This first release after the feature freeze and therefore has only bug fixes. It contains as well a new Browse activity (Version 92). Due to an interface change in xulrunner the downloads were broken in Joyride. They are fixed with this Browse release. Simon Schampijer added refinements to the autocompletion feature #7281 and #7280.

Due to a name change of the Browse activity (Web->Browse) you will likely have problems updating to the latest version. Find instructions here to work around that problem (Instructions to test in olpc joyride).

The sources can be found here:

sugar-0.81.6.tar.bz2

* #7438 sugar shuts down when you click Restart
* #7365 Invites not working
* #7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior
* #7339 CPU Spins after starting an activity
* #7015 Add proper alignment support to the “tray” control
* #5613 Cannot set non-ASCII nick name
* #7046 Deleting activity bundle with journal leaves it showing in Home list view until reboot
* #7391 Make the search field in Home reveal the list view
* #7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior
* #7272 Notifications are redundant with new launching feedback
* #7273 Activity icons remain colored after launch

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release (as well to the translation team for adding new languages and updating existing ones).

8. Handwriting: Julka Lipkova has been working on software for teaching children handwriting (handwriting activity); more details are available at http://olpc-dhw.blogspot.com/.

9. Movie portal: DailyMotion, which has an ogg-friendly website, is planning a video campaign to solicit new uploaded materials for OLPC (.dailymotion.com).

10. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar continues to progress on documenting the community’s best coding practices and conventions (Sugar_Almanac).

11. SocialCalc: Manusheel Gupta reports that the Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet), Luke Closs, and K.S. Preeti have SocialCalc (a spreadsheet activity) in Sugar. This is the first Sugar activity written in JavaScript (JS) to have been integrated to Python-based Sugar environment. They did this through XOCom, a wrapper function. The XOCom package will encourage the JS community to participate in developing software and content for Sugar (Please see socialcalc activity and Browse#Install_an_activity).

12. Physics: Brian Jordan and Alex Levenson have made great progress on the Physics activity (Physics-0.2.xo). Brian is planning a
Physics Jam for late August (Physics_meetings).

More physics: Joshua Minor created a wiki page discussing a file format for 2D physics scenes (Physics_File_Format).

13. Misc.: Tomeu Vizoso worked on stabilizing the development builds and helping David Van Assche who has volunteered to package Google Gears for OLPC. This work has exposed some issues in Browse that, once fixed, will allow the installation of several Firefox extensions.

Riccardo Lucchese, an intern at OLPC, will work on Browse performance during the next months; Riccardo has been doing some Sugar profiling.

wget http://www.bodhidharma.info/out.grapher.svg

Daniel Drake released Record-55 for compatibility with the newer GStreamer libraries present in Joyride/8.2.

Sugar Labs

14. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2008-July-05-11-som.jpg) The discussion seems to have drifted back towards the topic of learning.

Gary has moved all the SOM content to it’s own community wiki page:

Community/SOM

He has also uploaded the Sugar month by month SOMs as well, the direct link is:

Community/SOM#Sugar_Mailing_List

15.  Blogged: I’ll be posting these digests in blog form (here) starting this week.

Posted 27 May 2008 † admin § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °