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Sugar Digest 2010-03-07

Sugar Digest

1. activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO) has been the subject of much discussion of the past few weeks. One thread has been in regard to making ASLO a place where not only Sugar developers upload their activities, but where Sugar learners upload the media objects that they create with Sugar activities. For example, a place for children to upload and share their Turtle Art projects or Physics simulations. A second thread has been in regard to whether or not to allow activities to be uploaded onto ASLO that contain non-Sugar dependencies. An example might be an architecture-specific binary file that is included in a .xo bundle or simply a dependence on a library that is not part of the core Sugar distribution. The arguments for such restrictions have to do with robustness and user experience. We don’t want users to download activities that subsequently don’t run, either because of an architecture mis-match or a missing dependency. We also want to be very careful about automatically pulling in dependencies because bandwidth and local storage are extremely limited for many Sugar users. However, from the beginning, Sugar has accommodated activities with dependencies external to the Sugar core: Etoy, Write, and Browse being three examples. And with the growth of the netbook market and innovations such as Sugar on a Stick, it is inevitable that Sugar users will be using a wide variety of architectures. (For example, OLPC is exploring the use of ARM processors in their laptops.) And, while we want to provide a consistent and substantial learning experience within Sugar itself, the extent to which we can be inclusive of other learning activities gives Sugar users the ability to reach further than they would otherwise. None of this suggests that we are abandoning the idea of a learning platform that provides a collection of affordances to the learner, such as the Journal, collaboration, and view source; Sugar (Sucrose and Fructose) is mostly written in Python with a consistent user experience across all of its activities; but our learning community should not have artificial walls and ceiling.

In a post that ties the two threads together, Ben Schwartz wrote:

:If Sugar is working as intended, 99% of Activities will be crap. This is because the purpose of Sugar is to invite novices to engage actively in software development. Novices make bad stuff, and we want to install and run that stuff.

Or put another way, we want our learners to engage in creating and debugging, sharing their creations and engaging in a dialog about their creations. Developers learn by doing and so do children. ASLO is not just a portal for developers, it is a portal for learners.

Aleksey Lim (alsroot) solicited a policy statement from SLOB regarding the hosting of activity bundles with non-Sugar dependencies on activities.sugarlabs.org.

The Sugar Oversight Board passed a motion that: (1) Bundles with non-Sugar dependencies be clearly marked in ASLO; (2) We work towards a mechanism for supporting access to non-Sugar dependencies—a specific endorsement of being open; and (3) We do not restrict ASLO while we progress towards #2.

Mel Chua raised the question of support. I argued that this was a question orthogonal to architecture and dependencies, but that we clearly should make it clear to our user community that certain activities are supported. We’ll be discussing the details at our next meeting.

2. We are pulling together our Google Summer of Code proposal and will be looking for mentors from the community. If you are interested in being a mentor, please contact Tim McNamara (timclicks on IRC; paperless AT timmcnamara DOT co DOT nz).

In the community

3. Things are moving quickly in Argentina. Gonzalo Odiard has been blogging about their progress in La Rioja at [1] (Also see [2])

Sugar Labs

4. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [3]).

Posted 07 March 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-02-28

Sugar Digest

1. Tomorrow (Monday, 1 March) is Triage Day for the next Sugar release: Sucrose 0.88. We’ll be meeting on irc.freenode.net channel #sugar-meeting at 14UTC (9EST) to review the open tickets for the 0.88 milestone. We’ll also look at tickets from previous milestones that have remain open. The goal is to prioritize tickets based on their severity and their impact on our learning mission; we will subsequently allocate resources to the most important tickets; the milestone on some tickets will be reassigned to 0.90.

There are many ways to contribute to the triage effort: feedback from the field about priorities is especially important. Of course, we’d also like to hear from you if you’ll have time to help with coding.

Please join us.

2. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) has set up http://idea.sugarlabs.org as a place to capture ideas and discussions.

In the community

3. Deborah Nicholson of the Free Software Foundation asked me to pass along an announcement about LibrePlanet, a “free as in freedom” software conference. You can register at http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010.

Posted 28 February 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-02-23

Sugar Digest

1. In a conversation last night with Ivan Krstić, when asked what was “new and exciting” about Sugar, my response was “nothing, which is a good thing”. I then elaborated: Sugar is approaching a level of maturity where our milestones are stability and robustness rather than the introduction of “exciting” new features. This is evident in the 0.88 release—, which has relatively few new user-facing features, but many advances in terms of “under-the-hood” improvements that will make long-term deployment and maintenance easier. (I don’t mean to imply that Sugar is no longer an exciting project—the fact that we will soon surpass 2-million users is very exciting. And I find it thrilling to eavesdrop on the discussions by teachers regarding how they are using Sugar in advancing learning.)

You can help us reach our stability goal by testing, reporting bugs, and joining in our triage efforts. We will be having a triage session next Monday, 1 March 2010, at 9EST (14UTC) on irc.freenode.net (channel #sugar-meeting). Please join us as we review open tickets.

2. There is a nice compilation of recent academic papers on one-to-one computing (See [1]). Gary Martin has generated some self-organizing map (SOM) images of the papers (See [2]). To me, the most interesting take-away is the observation that access to computing at home has a significant impact on learning. This is an affirmation of the OLPC principle of child ownership—all too often children are not allowed access to school computing resources outside of school hours—and it suggests that approaches such as Sugar on a Stick, which allows the learning platform to travel with the child from the classroom to home may be even more significant than we had realized.

In the community

3. Joy Ventura Riach, manager of the One Laptop per Child Africa Regional Center in Kigali, lead a learning discussion on IRC last week. It was great to hear something about what is happening on the ground in the various OLPC deployments. The discussion continues this Thursday, 25 February, at 10EST (15UTC) on www.oftc.net (channel #olpc-learning).

4. Marisa E. Conde, who is participating in the OLPC/Sugar deployment in San Martín, Argentina, shared an informational website to the Sur list (See [3]).

5. The GNOME Foundation has been invited to participate to the Idlelo conference in May in Ghana. This is one of the biggest free software events in Africa. Please contact me if you are interesting in representing Sugar at the meeting.

Help Wanted

6. We could really use someone to take on the leadership role on testing. While we have some great testing resources and individuals in the community, having someone who is actively coordinating these efforts would make a huge difference. Please contact me or Simon Schampijer (erikos) if you are interested in such a role.

Tech talk

7. Aleksey Lim has created a Sugar 0.88-based ppa for Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10). Instructions for using it can be found here: [4]

8. Sebastian Dziallas has been compiling more complete documentation for Sugar on a Stick creation (See [5]).

9. Bryan Berry announced the Karma Lesson Template, a simple template for creating lessons for the XO and elsewhere (See [6]).

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [7]).

Posted 23 February 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-02-18

Sugar Digest

1. The Sugar Labs Development Team continues to make great progress towards our next release, Sucrose 0.88. Last weekend a “testing day” was held in which most of the new features exercised. There will be another meeting on Monday (February 22) at which we will be discussing various outstanding details as we approach “string freeze” on March 1. What has been significant in this release cycle has not only been the steady progress we have been making on improving and stabilizing the core Sugar platform, but also the introduction of a more systemic mechanism for proposing, vetting, and implementing new features. While the procedures we have put into place are still in need of fine-tuning, we have seen progress on one key goal—greater involvement from Sugar deployments. Sugar remains a volunteer-run project and thus it is what its community makes of it. Our release process is intended to provide a stable and predictable base from which the community can build. Long-term maintenance and growth will come from our community. A goal for Sucrose 0.90 is to have a well-defined set of features, proposed from downstream, and developed downstream. Sugar, like learning itself, is not something done for it. It is something you do for yourself.

2. Tony Forster, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés, Michael Stone, and Edward Cherlin have given me detailed feedback on the new Turtle Art. Raúl will be testing it this week in the field and I hope that with that additional feedback to be able to make a final release as part of Fructose 0.88. If you’d like to give it a test drive, please download it from the wiki:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/TurtleArt-83.xo

New user-interface features include support for multiple turtles (this enables the learner to engage in many of the types of problems opened up by learning systems such as StarLogo). To facilitate debugging, there is now runtime block highlighting and highlighting of the block that raised an error. Boolean logic is now prefix instead of infix, which makes it consistent with the arithmetic operators and less ambiguous in its visual parsing. Many other UI improvements, a trash palette (with restore), variable-length, editable string blocks, labels on coordinate-grid overlays, etc. were driven by feedback from the field.

We also completed a major refactoring of the code, resulting in a 90% smaller download bundle-size and a faster first-time launch. Our goal here is greatly simplified maintenance, more decentralized localization and easier extension with new blocks and palettes.

3. Sugar on a Stick, Blueberry, is now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) permanent collection.

In the community

4. Sorry for the last minute notice, but Joy Ventura Riach from One Laptop Per Child’s regional center in Africa is organizing Learning Team chats. The first meeting will be on Thursday, February 18, at 10 EST (15 UTC). Go to [1] to join the discussion.

Tech talk

5. Thanks to the efforts of Luke Faraone, Sugar Labs has received some servers donated from the Wikipedia project. They will be deployed in various locations, including RIT, Washington, and Cambridge. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) is helping in the effort to get the new machines up and running and properly configured to meet our growing needs.

Sugar Labs

6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [2] and [3]).

Posted 18 February 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-02-02

Sugar Digest

1. I am once again falling behind in my writing. This time I have two excuses: travel and coding. I spent last week in Miami, not to escape the cold Boston winter, but to attend the OLPC deployment meeting. (This is first time since I left OLPC almost two-years ago that I have been invited to participate in an OLPC event.) It was great to see many old friends with passion in their hearts for the project. The highlight of the week was of course the presentations from the deployments. Many of the larger OLPC deployments gave detailed updates of the progress and plans—all of which include Sugar. The variety of means by which the deployments engage in outreach was fascinating. For example, in Paraguay, which still has a relatively modest deployment, they have been setting the stage for an eventual nationwide roll-out by publishing weekly “how-to-use Sugar” storyboards in the newspaper. In every case, the deployment teams have been considering not just the technology, but also their cultural context. The vector is pointing in the right direction.

A concrete idea that surfaced during the discussions was to explicitly add the creation of a local Sugar Lab to the offering whenever OLPC partners with new deployment. The local lab would provide the means for the local community to nurture growth in their local Free Software community and to engage with the global Sugar community more systemically and efficiently. Another result from the meeting is that Claudia Urrea, one the education/deployment leads for OLPC, will be joining our Design Team meetings. Her direct feedback will be very helpful.

2. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I are finally to the point where we would like some testing and feedback on the Turtle Art refactoring project. We have been rewriting much of code over the past month with several goals in mind: (1) make it easier to maintain; (2) make it easier to localize; (3) make it easier to incorporate new features; and (4) make it easier for the end-user to modify.

So far, we have completed a major refactoring of the code:

  • object-oriented
  • 90% smaller download bundle-size
  • faster first-time launch
  • simplified i18n maintenance
  • easier to add new blocks and palettes

and added new user interface features:

  • support for multiple turtles
  • expandable blocks
  • trash palette (with a restore button)
  • variable-length string blocks
  • editable strings

Still to come:

  • a new collaboration model, where multiple turtles are shared
  • conversion to Cairo graphics for the Turtle
  • better program visualization during run-time

You can download the new Turtle Art for testing from TurtleArt-83.xo. The source is in the refactoring branch of the TurtleArt project on gitorious.

3. It is worthwhile to periodically check on the Sugar-related materials being created in the field. For example, the teachers in Uruguay continue to assemble lesson plans for using Sugar in the classroom at the Plan Ceibal website. There is a real wealth of materials there.

4. Thanks to an introduction by Chuck Kane, I am in touch with the team that developed GeoGebra. GeoGebra is free software for learning and teaching mathematics. Written in Java, “it combines interactive geometry, algebra, calculus, and spread-sheets in one easy-to-use system for students of all ages.” It could be a candidate for Aleksey Lim’s Sugar Services efforts.

In the community

5. Kevin Mauricio Benavides Castro pointed out to me an article about the work going on in rural Nicuaragua (See [1]).

6. Cristian Paul Peñaranda Rojas has created an XO-man-inspired case for Sugar-on-a-Stick. You can download the CAD model from  Thingiverse.

7. Hilaire Fernandes, the author of DrGeo, is looking for feedback on his interactive geometry software (developed with Squeak and deployed on Etoys).

Tech talk

8. The Design Team is meeting with great regularity and is making progress on many of the 0.88 features. You can follow the progress in the wiki.

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past two weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM and SOM). The latter image does a nice job of visualizing the on-going discussion about trademarks.

Posted 02 February 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-01-19

Sugar Digest

1. In the spirit of making Sugar and Sugar Activities readily appropriated and modified by the end user, I have been distracted of late writing code. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I have been working on a refactoring of Turtle Art in order to make it easier to extend by teachers—a long-standing goal. I have an ulterior motive as well: making Turtle Art (and other Activities) easier to maintain. Towards that effort, I have been reworking and streamlining some of the library classes: specifically, the sprite module and the graphics generation module. The focus on these libraries is to address a typical problem I struggle with: localization. The Turtle Art graphics are assembled from a combination of pre-composed artwork and strings that are translated as part of the localization process. A word or phrase that is short in one language might be long in another, e.g., ‘left’ in English and ‘izquierda’ in Spanish. Coming up with static graphics that can accommodate this degree of variation has been a challenge. The original Turtle Art graphics were bitmaps (GIF), which are not readily amenable to manipulation. In an earlier refactoring, I converted the graphics to vectors (SVG), but I still have had to do a lot of hand-tuning of the artwork, saving the results in individual files for each language. In the case of Turtle Art, this has been unwieldy: thousands of files are involved. The solution I am exploring is the dynamic generation of the graphics, where I combine the use of SVG and Pango. I am hopeful that the end results will not only be easier to maintain, but will also enable more facile extensions to the base Activity. To test some of these ideas, I updated the VisualMatch Activity to use the new libraries. It not only allowed me to streamline the Activity itself, but it also made it much easier to add new play modes—adding Mayan took less than 30 minutes—and adding end-user editing—it was suddenly trivial to allow the users to modify the cards used in the word game. I’m close to pushing these changes into Turtle Art as well. Hopefully we will see more local forks of the code as the barriers to modification and maintenance are lowered.

2. Speaking of Turtle Art, there is a wonderful essay on the origins of the Logo turtle at [1].

3. Most of the work we have been doing during our December and January Sugar Labs oversight-board meetings has been in regard to our Trademark policies. We are very close reaching consensus on a redrafting of our policy. Please add your comments and give us your feedback before our next meeting, Friday, 22 January, at 16UTC (11EST) in #sugar-meeting on irc.freenode.net.

In the community

4. I gave two short talks about modifying Sugar over the weekend: one in Washington DC at the OLPC Learning Club meeting and one in Wellington, New Zealand at the Linux Conference Australia (LCA) education miniconference. (In both cases, I appeared remotely, saving a bit of wear and tear on my body and my carbon footprint.) My notes are available on line as well: [2].

5. The call for papers for the [http://academic-conferences.org/icel/icel2010/icel10-minitrack.htm 5th International Conference on e-Learning] has been extended until the 22nd January 2010. This is a good opportunity to submit some abstracts about Sugar.

6. Kaçandre Bourdelais announced the creation of FranXOphonie, a community portal for Sugar projects in Francophone countries around the world, including Senegal, Haïti, Cameroon, Vietnam, Central Africa, Rwanda, Libreville, Madagascar, Mali, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and, of course, France.

Tech talk

7. Simon Schampijer convened a meeting of the design team to discuss a number of open-ended design issues for Sugar 0.88. The most hotly debated topic has been the question of how to best accommodate both ’start new’ and ‘resume’ on the Home View. Part of the contention has been a lack of consensus regarding the role of the Home View vs. the Journal in resuming Activities. A seemingly reasonable compromise has been reached—although we will have to do some thorough testing before pushing the change. The gist of the compromise is to make the Journal a permanent part of the Home View—thus more accessible—a change that has merit in itself. Gary Martin has made some mock-up images as a means of visualizing the ideas being discussed (See [3] and [4]).

8. Sascha Silbe’s version-support fork of Sugar is available for testing. Please see [5] for details.

9. Sascha’s VNC-based sugar-emulator (which can be used instead of the often problematic Xephyr) is also available for testing. If you use sugar-jhbuild and have had problems with keyboard mappings or window-manager interactions, you may want to try the VNC version.

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 19 January 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2010-01-07

Sugar Digest

1. Aleksey Lim has started a discussion about how to better coordinate—in a more welcoming and friendly manner—our various development activities with the needs of deployments. This complements Luke Faraone’s thread from a few weeks ago about a redesign of the website, based in part from feedback from the Babson team’s study of Sugar Labs. The gist of the various conversations is that we need to tackle a typical Free-Software project issue: how can we make the project more friendly and accessible to non-technical people; and, related, manage the explosion of pages, sites, points of view on the project without limiting expression on the part of individual contributors. Part of the answer certainly lies in providing a bit more structure to our website. Part of the answer likely lies in more outreach to where the non-techies hang out. (I had put together a survey last year for the teachers in Uruguay to solicit feedback on this topic, but alas, it was never conducted.) I am not sure we know what are the best channels for reaching teachers, parents, etc. In any case, it is an important issue for us. Please contribute to the discussion.

In the community

2. Bruno Coudoin announced the release of GCompris Version 9.0. Aleksey is already working on making sure that it is properly packaged for Sugar and available on our Sugar Activity download site.

3. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Jim Simmons has been working on a beginner’s guide to creating Sugar Activities. He has made great progress and is at the point where some constructive criticize would be helpful (Please see Sugar Activities Guide).

Help wanted

4. David Farning has been working on an Ubuntu-Sugar remix. He is looking for help with testing. The release can be downloaded from http://people.sugarlabs.org/dfarning/.

Tech talk

5. Aleksey has been busy working on Sugar Services—a decentralized means of supporting Sugar Activity dependencies. He announced that the first version is ready to test or use in simple cases. Please refer to the wiki for more details about Sugar Services (known issues, what Sugar Services is, what Sugar Services is not).

6. Simon Schampijer has resurfaced the discussion about Resume vs Start new activity instance from the Home View. Please contribute your thoughts and observations from the field.

Sugar Labs

12. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 07 January 2010 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

Sugar Digest 2009-12-31

Sugar Digest

1. The coming of a new year is a good time for reflection and setting of goals. At Sugar Labs, we have a lot to reflect upon in 2009 and a lot to look forward to in 2010.

We began 2009 in engaged in a healthy debate about how best to put powerful tools for learning into the hands of children. I consider it a healthy sign that as we are reaching the end of 2009, we are still engaged in that debate. As a community, we remain passionate and outspoken about things that matter and we continue to ask how our work impacts learning.

In January we felt the shock-wave of the “reorganization” of One Laptop per Child. As a result OLPC has more directly leveraged the efforts of the Sugar community and we have a more productive cooperation between our organizations; perhaps more important, we are beginning to see more cooperation between Sugar Labs and one-laptop-per-child deployments around the world. In March we released Sucrose 0.84 and got news of our acceptance into the Google Summer of Code program. We were establishing a reputation for being responsible and reliable members of the FOSS community. In September we learned that ”every” child in Uruguay is now a Sugar user. In October, we exceeded 1-million downloads on activities.sugarlabs.org (At the year’s end, we are over the 1,750,000-download mark).

On the technical front, we reached some major milestones and saw many smaller achievements in 2009: Simon Schampijer oversaw the 0.84 and 0.86 releases and is leading the 0.88 effort; Tomeu Vizoso, who does all things Sugar, found the time to make “view source” universal across all activities and integrate Gnash more fully into Sugar; Sebastian Dziallas released two versions of Sugar on a Stick, leading the way for other GNU/Linux distributions to release LiveUSB images of Sugar, including Thomas C Gilliard, David Van Assche, and the openSUSE community efforts as well as Rubén Rodríguez Pérez’s Triquel-based Sugar on Toast; Jonas Smedegaard continues his work on maintaining Sugar on Debian; the Fedora community’s dedication to Sugar remains unparalleled(special kudos to Steven Parrish, Chris Ball, Daniel Drake, Paul Fox, Peter Robinson, Mel Chua, et al.); Bryan Berry and the team in Nepal launched the Karma project; Michael Stone made significant progress in making Rainbow run outside of the constraints of the OLPC deployments of Sugar; we saw patches being submitted by educators; contributions of accessibility code from Esteban Arias and the LATU team; the launch of our activity portal (thanks to Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning); Benjamin Schwartz made progress on GroupThink; the Activity Team made ebooks a central focus; Bernie Innocenti, David Farning, and the Infrastructure Team have given us a solid base for growth; Wade Brainerd (had a baby) and kept the Activity Team vibrant; James Simmons has been both writing some of our more popular activities and documenting how to write a Sugar activity; Sayamindu Dasgupta has done great work leading the i18n team and he made a fork of Turtle Art to support the Arduino; Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés, Martin Abente,  and the team in Paraguay have made numerous contributions, including an inventory tool and 3G support (with cross-border cooperation from Daniel Castelo); and Aleksey Lim made contributions to virtually every corner of Sugar and Sugar Labs.

My personal highlights for 2009 were a chance to meet so many community members face to face for the first time: Tony Forster and Bill Kerr in Melbourne; Sebastian Dziallas in Berlin; Gary Martin, Sascha Silbe, Bruno Coudoin, David Van Assche, Marten Vijn, Christian Vanizette, and Sean Daly in Paris; Pia Waugh and Donna Benjamin in Hobart; Mike Usmar in Auckland and Tabitha Roper in Wellington; Diego Uribe in Cambridge; Gerald Ardito in New York; Paul Flint, Kevin Cole, Nicco Eneidi, and Colin Applegate in Barre; Luke Faraone and Jeff Elkner in Washington; Kiko Mayorga in Lima; etc.

I would also be remiss in not pointing out the pleasure I got in reading Sdenka Salas’s Sugar manual, Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez’s reports from her classroom in Uruguay, Tony Foster’s blog posts on Turtle Art, the posts by Bill Kerr’s students on Sugar, and being greeted by a room full of children running the Sugar Speak program in a simultaneous chorus of “Welcome Mr. Bender.”

We had set some short-term goals for ourselves in 2009: to grow our community, broaden its code base, and most important, increase the number of children using Sugar. While we may have fallen short in our goals of “building a Sugar presence in the forums that teachers habituate”, the vector is pointing in the right direction–teacher engagement on the Sur list being a bellwether. We did not reach as many children through Sugar on netbooks; Sugar on a Stick; and Sugar deployed through a terminal server as we are currently reaching through our OLPC collaboration–something to aim for in 2010. Our “Big Overarching Goals for 2010″ will be the subject of a Sugar Digest post in January.

2. The Babson College project report on Strategies for Sugar deployments in US schools is now in the wiki (See Sugar Deployment in US Schools Report and Final Presentation).

Sugar Labs

3. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 31 December 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2009-12-22

Sugar Digest

1. Tomeu Vizoso blogged about his trip to Uruguay. He attended the LATU (Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay), the organization managing the technical aspects of the Sugar/OLPC deployment in Uruguay. While it was a great opportunity for Tomeu to see Sugar in action and meet local teachers and technologists, perhaps the most important aspect of the trip was that he had the opportunity to lead the .uy community closer to the mainline Sugar community.

The concrete issue they found when developing on their own was that every time that their upstream (OLPC) produced a new image build, in order to benefit from the improvements in that release they had to apply the customizations made locally, solve any conflicts and retest everything. If they had contributed those modifications to Sugar, OLPC images would have come with them and no further work would be needed. Reaching the point in which they can directly use the OLPC images as-is is still a bit far away, but every bit that they integrate upstream is a step in the right direction and reduces their development and support costs. Also, when their employees work within the communities that maintain their software, they work directly with the most qualified engineers in those technologies, increasing local capacity.

You can read first-hand reports from Uruguay here.

2. John Markoff of the New York Times wrote about a new book by Jim Gray, A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing. According to Markoff, Gray, who works for Microsoft, describes an “era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.” He argues for government support for “cheaper clusters of computers to manage and process all this[sic] data.” The goal is “to have a world in which all of the science literature is online, all of the science data is online, and they interoperate with each other.” Alas, there is no mention of Free Software in the article. It is not clear to me how a proprietary system would solve any of the problems Gray is describing. Sigh.

3. I have been working through a number of logistical and administrative issues with the Software Freedom Conservancy with the goal of streamlining our interactions with them. (Like Sugar Labs, they are a volunteer organization—the extent to which we can smooth out any mismatches in expectation or practice will well serve both organizations. While we benefit from the numerous services provided by the conservancy, we are also under an obligation to abide by its mission—promoting FOSS projects—and work within its administrative structure. With input from Karen and Bradley, I’ve written up some administrative procedures for handling transactions regarding requests for payment, project proposal approvals, and license requests in the wiki. Feedback is most welcome.

From the community

4. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and the Sugar/OLPC team in Paraguay have developed an inventory and tracking system for helping to manage deployment logistics. There tool lets you:

  • import list of children and their document IDs; and upload information about schools, teachers, geographic coordinates, etc.;
  • keep track of laptops given to children;
  • report tickets (screen broken, OS reinstall needed); do follow-ups; and close tickets;
  • use an embedded Google-maps widget to track access points and servers and their availability;
  • generate reports: laptops delivered; open tickets; network status; network availability over time; laptops spread among schools; etc.;
  • report stolen laptops (so they won’t get more leases);
  • automatize generation of leases (based on the status of laptops: activated, stolen, etc.)

The manual (in Spanish) is available here. An English-language manual is in the works.

To install the package, you’ll need to add their repository:
Create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/pyeduca.repo with the following content:

[pyeduca-base]
name=Packages used by Paraguay Educa
baseurl=http://repo.paraguayeduca.org/yum/base
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Then:

yum install inventario

5. Jim Simmons is writing a FLOSSmanual guide to writing Sugar Activities for beginners (See http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ActivitiesGuideSugar/WebHome).

6. Tomeu has created a new page in the wiki for describing “vacancies” in our community.

Tech Talk

7. Chris Ball announce Build OS64 as the “final” release build for new XO-1.5 laptops. This is a Fedora-11-based system with Suagr 0.84 as well as a GNOME desktop. Release notes are available here.

8. Bryan Berry announced the release of Karma Version 0.2 (See http://karma.sugarlabs.org). “The Karma Project aims to create high-quality open-source educational software using openweb technologies for the Sugar desktop educational environment. karma.js is a Javascript library for manipulating HTML 5 and SVG in any context.” Please note that you will need Firefox 3.5 or Google Chrome/Chromium to run the demos. The Karma-2.xo bundle is available at karma-2.xo. There is a Karma tutorial series as well (See [1],[2],[3],[4]).

9. Sayamindu Dasgupta has built a fork of Turtle Art that support the Arduino. The Arduino is “an open-source electronics prototyping platform… intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” Instructions can be found here. Note that there is also support for the Arduino for Etoys (See http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/).

10. Michael Stone announced the release of rainbow-0.8.6. (Rainbow implements portions of the isolation shell described in the Bitfrost threat model and security architecture.) There are a number of new features in this release, including “support for garbage collection of uids, ui sugar for resuming uids, bug fixes to the resume logic, and a simplified singly-linked list library.” Please help with testing: git, tar, browse, setup, and tests

11. Simon Schampijer announced the first tarballs for Sugar 0.88. Some of the new features are ready for testing. (Simon will be working with Sebastian Sdziallas to make a Sugar-on-a-Stick spin for facilitating testing.)

Sugar Labs

12. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Posted 22 December 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2009-12-15

Sugar Digest

1. Last Friday a team from Babson College presented a project report on their strategy for Sugar deployments in US schools. Natalia Grigoras, Wei Lin, and Anna Ivashko participated in a semester-long study of Sugar as part of a Management Consulting Field Experience course. Their mentor was George Lee.

The team undertook the tasks modeling the target audience, uncovering barriers, studying impact, and developing a strategy and recommendation for effectively implementing Sugar in US school systems. I had been working with them throughout the fall; Bernie, Dogi, Luke, Adam, and I attended their final presentation, which will soon be posted in the wiki.

Their methodology included secondary research into existing systems, funding models, etc. and primary research in the form of interviews with teachers, superintendent, technology specialist, etc.

Their findings include an analysis of Sugar’s strengths (breadth, flexibility, collaborative experience, focus on children) and shortcomings (need for extensive up-front training, lack of centralized support, reliability, and resistance to change). Their recommendation include:

  • more web-based support for educators and end-users;
  • standardized guidelines and training programs for teachers during their first exposure to Sugar; and
  • targeted marketing approach to superintendents and technology coordinators.

2. Tomeu Vizoso has been in Uruguay both attending the Ceibel 09 conference and meeting with teachers and the LATU engineering team. While we await his “trip report” (hint) an immediate consequence of his visit is more of a presence of .uy on the #sugar channel in IRC.

3. Tony Forster has created a great [http://tonyforster.blogspot.com series of blog posts] on creative uses of Turtle Art. He has couched these presentations within the context of a discussion of interactive multimedia and critical literacy in media.

4. The minutes of last week’s Sugar oversight-board meeting are available in the wiki. We tackled a number of issues, including several motions in regard to the outstanding questions that had been in front of the Sugar-on-a-stick decision panel. The discussion will continue this Friday, 18 December, at 15UTC (10EST) in #sugar-meeting on irc.freenode.net.

Tech Talk

5. Simon Schampijer’s work on systematizing the new feature process for Sugar development has led to a number of great discussions on IRC. Search for the tag [Feature] in the devel list.

Sugar Labs

6. Gary Martin has prepared a map of last week’s discussion on the Sugar IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

(This got posted a but late due to the death of my laptop earlier this week.)

Posted 18 December 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °