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Sugar Digest

1. It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.

The center piece was the announcement of Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry. May thanks due to Sebastian Dziallas and the Fedora packaging team as well as Sean Daly and the Sugar Labs marketing team (we got unprecedented international coverage). Simon Schampijer organized a Sugar Labs booth at LinuxTag (see his write-up below).

The bookends were the FOSSed and NECC meetings. Caroline Meeks and I ran a workshop for teachers at FOSSed and along with Caryl Bigenho, Stephen Jacobs, and Mike Lee, we presented at NECC unplugged.

Caroline and I also made several trips to the Gardner and Lilla G. Frederick schools, where we are conducting Sugar on a Stick pilot programs this summer. We are running planning sessions with the teachers and start working with the students next week. Both schools have structured programs in the morning and open-ended discovery in the afternoon. It is in these afternoon sessions that we’ll be using Sugar, as a compliment to the morning activities.

2. Two high-school students from Rwanda are interning with me this summer. Eric and Peter will be adding some debugging features to Turtle Art and following up with some classroom experiments when they return to Rwanda in August. We’ll take some inspiration from some observations Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I made while debugging Turtle Art project remotely. It was clear that it wasn’t clear to the programmer where in the code one was executing at the time of an error. Eric and Peter’s goal is to highlight the brick being executed as one steps through the program. Raúl, for his part, has taken on the challenge of adding hover-activated tool tips.

3. Alan Kay, Tony Forster, Ed Cherlin et al. have been in a discussion ( 1, 2) about teaching physics that highlights the difference between diagnostic aids and physical thinking. Worth a read. K. K. Subramaniam (Subbu) pointed to a parody, “The Montillation of Traxoline” that really spoke to me about the problem of “the ‘intermediation’ that has crept into the science education in recent decades. It is no longer about direct experience. It is about dealing with text in books, pictures on charts and movies on screen. It is about literacy, not comprehension.”

4. Meanwhile, in the spirit of Sugar, we now have a page in the wiki describing how modify the Physics Activity.

5. Simon made regular reports from LinuxTag in his blog. Kudos to Simon for all his work in organizing the booth and to Tony Anderson, David Van Assche, Sean Daly, Sebastian Dziallas, Bert and Rita Freudenberg and the Squeak Team, Adam Holt, and James Zaki. Also thanks to our booth partners, Skolelinux, X2GO, and Linux4Afrika.

Help Wanted

6. Maria del Pilar Saenz has put out a call for participation in the various Sugar Labs Colombia programs. “If you are a teacher, engineer, student, free software enthusiast or related, you can collaborate. No matter the experience you have, what Most importantly, the dedication that can be given to projects.”

In the community

7. I’ll be giving a keynote at GUADEC; my plan is to both introduce Sugar to the broader desktop community (with the goal of recruiting more contributors), to sing the praises of the desktop—the cloud is not the solution to all problem—but also articulate the need for more simplicity along the entire spectrum from developers to end users.

8. Squeakfest will be held in Los Angeles 10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho.

9. There will be a Sugar track at the Free Software Week in Bolzano, Italy, the week of 9 November 2009. We will likely start the Sugar Hackfest the weekend before in order to accommodate the restricted schedules of some of our community members, e.g., students. Free Software Week (and South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2009) is sponsored by TIS innovation park.

Tech Talk

10. Fred Grose continues to keep watch over our wiki. It remains a navigable site despite our growth in content and diversity over the past year.

11. Thomas C Gilliard has added a Sugar VM to the Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

12. Aleksey Lim announced V3 of the Sugar Activities Library. Aleksey merged and adapted the AMO upstream code (the Mozilla Addon codebase).

Sugar Labs

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

Sugar Digest

1. I am reminded of the power of IRC almost daily. Not only is it a place to ask a question, but it is a window into a wealth of discussion among domain experts trying to solve problems.

An analogy can be made to the “Engine Culture” described by David Cavallo in his PhD thesis: in rural Thailand, engineers would work on motorcycle engines en plein air, retrofitting them to solve the problem du jour—a rice mill, a water pump, etc.—while the village children would gather around, taking in everything. IRC provides a similar opportunity. Hanging out in #sugar presents a great opportunity to gather around and take in everything.

We should experiment with ways to broaden participation with this learning opportunity. Some thoughts:

In Sugar, we bundle an IRC Activity that defaults to #sugar.

• Is there more we can do to encourage participation?
• Should we be creating a more diverse set of channels populated by experts in other disciplines?
• Perhaps even a channel per Activity?
• Has anyone every written a bot to export an IRC channel to Twitter or Facebook?
  It might to increase the reach of the discussion to a new audience.

2. Bruce Byfield wrote an article for “Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops” for LWN.net for which he interviewed Gary Martin. The article is subscriber-only, so I have extract a few quotes.

The concept of Activities originates in Sugar, the desktop designed for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. In Sugar, “Activities” is used as a synonym for “application.” However, Gary C. Martin, one of the coordinators for Sugar’s Activity Team, explains that the change is more than semantics or marketing. Because Activities run within the general collaborative frame of Sugar, using them is intended as a very different experience than running a standalone application on a traditional desktop.

“For me, the key parts of Activities are that they combine concepts of document, executable, and collaboration state into a single, simple to use user interface. With the Activity state automatically kept in the Journal, it’s easy to resume or reflect on past work, and, with realtime collaboration as a first class feature, peer sharing and group work is strongly encouraged.”

In other words, Sugar’s Activities are not just about running an application, or learning how to produce a spreadsheet or a presentation. Instead, they are conceived as part of the total learning experience that Sugar is designed to provide.

3. It is great to see some of the core ideas such as Activities that underly Sugar become more mainstream. This will help us to broaden our community and our reach. C. Scott Ananian blogged about Google Wave, a new collaboration model that has many goals in common with the Sugar collaboration model. Meanwhile, Benjamin Schwartz continues to make progress on his Google Summer of Code project, GroupThink, a completely decentralized, asynchronous text editing system.

4. Between interviews, Gary has been busy cranking out mock ups for a new Sugar splash screen.

5. All in a name: We have been have a discussion on the lists and in IRC about what to call the pending Sugar on a Stick release. The confusion lies in the gulf between the “stick”, which will consist of Sugar Sucrose 0.84 and Fedora 11, both of which are essentially frozen, and the needs of a school to make a successful deployment, which includes requirements beyond the individual sticks themselves, e.g., a backup mechanism, documentation, etc. On the one hand, the developer have completed their work and are preparing to move on to the next phase: Sucrose 0.86 and Fedora 12. On the other hand, we don’t want to set expectations that Sugar on a Stick is complete in regard to classroom settings, where we are only just beginning to do testing.

One proposed solution to this communications dichotomy is to use separate names for an individual stick and a collection of sticks used in a school setting. The best I’ve been able to come up with for the latter is Sugar Grove. Please share any thoughts you might have on naming with the SoaS and Marketing teams.

Help Wanted

6. My plea for help this week is in regard to orphaned activities. There is a list of activities with no active maintainer in the wiki. Adopting one or more of these activities would make a great summer project and be a practical way into Sugar development.

In the community

7. Sugar will be well represented at LinuxTag in Berlin at the end of June. There will be a Sugar Camp in Berlin following LinuxTag, so plan to stay in town for a few extra days. Details soon.

Tech Talk

8. David Van Assche reported over the weekend about the extraordinary progress made by the openSUSE team.

:We’ve now managed to get pretty much every activity behaving, including the underlying journaling and collaboration. We’ve got more than 50 activities packaged and included in the live cd/usb/dvd/virtual appliance. By using the incredible flexibility and power that oBS gives us, with just 2 people working on this project, we’ve managed move forwards fast and efficiently. So we are proud to announce that you can download the latest releases
here.

9. Sebastian Dziallas continues to make great progress towards a Sugar on a Stick release at LinuxTag. There is another image to test, which includes, among other things, the updated gstreamer-plugins-espeak package (now on
version 0.3.3).

• Live Image
• Virtual Appliance

10. Tony Forster has caught a new bug: screencasting. First, he got it to work from the command line:

./recordmydesktop

Press Ctrl-c to terminate.

copy-to-journal out.ogv -m video/ogg

Then he managed to patch the screencast activity such that it saves properly to the Journal (See Activities/Screencast).

11. Aleksey Lim has made an initial release of Library activity in order to get some feedback about UI and basic ideas of activity. Feedback welcome.

12. Mihai Sucan has a very detailed analysis of how to optimize the interactions between Gecko, CSS, and the OLPC-XO canvas, which uses a non-standard scaling algorithm. You can read about it here.

Sugar Labs

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

Sugar Digest

1. I’m back from an exhilarating weekend in Paris, where we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the founding of Sugar Labs: Saturday was the OLPC France meeting at La Cantine and Sunday was Sugar Camp at La Ruche—both venues a short walk from my cousin’s flat near République.

The OLPC France meeting, attended by about 50 people, gave us a chance to network with some old friends and colleagues and build some new connections that will further enhance the Sugar community. For example, Tomeu Vizoso, Bernie Innocenti, and I had a chance to spend time with Bruno Coudoin; we discussed various ways we can improve upon the GCompris integration into Sugar. It was also great to finally meet in person Sugar contributors such as Gary Martin, Sache Silbe, David Van Assche, and Marten Vijn. It was also great that Marco Presenti Gritti was able to attend. The day was broken up into a number of parallel workshops, with a overall focus on deployment needs. Many of us never left the coffee bar, where there was continuous conversation. Kudos to Bastien Guerry and Lionel Laske for organizing a great day at a great venue and bringing together such interesting people.

About one half of the Saturday attendees came to Sugar Camp on Sunday. Sean Daly organized the day; he provided his flat for an urban camping experience for the attendees and found a great venue overlooking the canal on Quai de Jemmapes. We didn’t have preset agenda topics, rather we spend the first hour using SCAMPER to expand our thinking about potential discussion topics (See Archive/2009-05-11). From the four topics I had listed as a seed to the discussion, we generated almost 50 ideas. We then used a variant of PPCo to define four topics for the day, which we labeled: Sugar Roadmap, Packaging Sugar, Marketing Roadmap, and the School Experience. Within each group, we iterated upon the process to generate working groups that would be tasked with coming up with tasks and deliverables. (I’ll be posting the meeting notes as soon as the group secretaries send them my way.)

There have been several posting regarding Sugar Camp from the perspectives of the various attendees, e.g., David Farning’s and Sean’s posts. There was very positive feedback regarding the creativity process—we stretched ourselves and enriched the discussion as a result. And of course, it was great to spend time together. The downside was that we were not at all successful in engaging the online community in the process—in part due to technical difficulties (a flaky network) and in part by not have a good sense of how to do it. This is something we should work on in advance of the next gathering, which will likely be at LinuxTag in Berlin. Another downside was that we really could have used another day or two to go into more depth on some topics, particularly technical themes. A codefest as a follow-up to the weekend would have been ideal.

(There are photos from both days in here and here and here.)

2. Tomeu, Marco, Bastian, and I formed one of the afternoon working groups. Our goal was to come up with some concrete suggestions regarding telling the Sugar story. We decided to start off with something pretty basic: the generation of more screencasts of Sugar from a wide variety of viewpoints, e.g., developers, teachers, students, etc. Both Chris Ball and the MediaMods team had written a screencast activities that would merit some TLC. Meanwhile, Bastian helped my get xvidcap running on my machine (an HP laptop running Ubuntu Jaunty) so that I could make videos from sugar_jhbuild:

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

You can run xvidcap from within Sugar itself from the Terminal activity or, perhaps easier in the context of sugar_jhbuild, run it in parallel with Sugar.

I made a test video of the xo-color activity and posted the results to dailymotion.com with tags such as “Sugar” and “activity”. I plan on creating a wide range of videos, showing everything from running activities to installing them to debugging them. Let’s try to flood Dailymotion with great Sugar stories. (BTW, Dailymotion will automatically convert videos to OGG so that they will run within Sugar without the need for proprietary codecs.) Sebastien Adgnot has already set up an OLPC channel and will make a Sugar channel available as well.

Help Wanted

3. We need your Sugar stories.

In the community

4. The next Ceibal Jam in Uruguay will be in two weeks (30 May and 6 June at the University of Montevideo). Programmers are invited, but also designers, educators, artists, and anyone who wants work in the design, content, programming and testing activities new or improvement of existing activities. Who is coming from Sugar Labs?

Tech Talk

5. Chris Ball announced on behalf of OLPC that they have decided to base the software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. They plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once.)

6. Chris also announced that Build 8.2.1-802 will be the final 8.2.1 Release for the OLPC XO-1 hardware (See Release notes and Instructions for upgrading to the 8.2.1 Release).

7. James Simmons has offered some good advice regarding “Creating Your First Sugar Activity.”

Sugar Labs

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

Sugar Digest

I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: “math instruction”, which has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and “70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal”, which has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions.

Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY. Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in developing children’s creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to better disseminate creativity heuristics?

Diego is of the believe that creativity is a skill that can be taught; there has been more than 50 years of research into how to teach this skill; and yet creativity is rarely a deliberate part of mainstream education.

Diego introduced me to Ruth Noller’s formula for creativity that I had not previously encountered: The probability of creativity is a function of knowledge, innovation, and experience, modulated by attitude. In this formulation, attitude is often the weak link.

Central to his own vision of teaching creativity as a skill is the ability to strike the proper balance between divergent and convergent thinking.

Guidelines for divergent thinking

• defer judgment
• go for quantity
• make connections
• seek novelty

Guidelines for convergent thinking

• apply affirmative judgment
• keep novelty alive
• check your objectives
• stay focused

(I was reminded of David Reed’s analogy to water and ice: innovation occurs in its liquid phase; consolidation in its solid phase.)

Diego was “preaching to the choir.” When I was director of the Media Lab, I never told the students or faculty what to work on—their ideas were always much better than mine—but I did insist on a creative (learning) process that I described in a paper, “The seven secrets of the Media Lab”.

The phases of the moon represent the cyclical process of innovation at the Media Lab. In the 1980s we used to describe the first phase of the innovation cycle as ‘demo or die’. John Maeda rephrased our mantra in the late 1990s to be ‘imagine and realize’. Indeed, it is a violation of our cultural norm to have an idea and not build a prototype — in large part because of our deeply-held belief that we learn through expressing. Building a prototype also enables us to advance to the second phase of the innovation cycle — critique. The Lab, which has its origins in architecture (the founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, is an architect) draws upon the tradition of studio design critique; we have daily visits from our industry partners and other practitioners with whom we engage in an authentic critical dialogue about the work. In this exchange, the work is discussed within a broader context — ideas (and prototypes) are exchanged, improvements and alternatives suggested. We then advance to the third phase of the innovation cycle — iterate. Iteration within the Lab means returning to ‘Step One’ to push our ideas further. Iteration within our partners’ organizations means taking a prototype towards real-world application. In both cases, we can learn from our mistakes (and successes).

Another secret is fire:

Fire fuels the Media Lab. We invest in the passion of people, not their projects. It is the fire that burns in every student and faculty member that inspires and motivates them — love is a better master than duty. Innovation at the Lab comes from the bottom up. It is not regulated by a top-down process, but by continuous feedback from peers, the faculty, and our external collaborators.

These principles proved affective at MIT in establishing a learning community that is both collaborative and critical. These same principles were an influence on the design of Sugar; however, we can probably do more to embody them directly into Sugar itself.

Diego and I spent the next two hours exploring how we might make the creative process more explicit in Sugar. He suggested that we consider two common, approachable heuristics in our deliberations—SCAMPER and PPCo.

SCAMPER is a technique developed by Alex Osborn, described in his book Applied Imagination. SCAMPER is an acronym for “substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, reverse.” It is used for encouraging divergent thinking.

PPCo is also an acronym: “positives, potentials, concerns, overcoming concerns.” It was developed by Roger Firestien and Diane Foucar-Szocki; it is used for convergent thinking.

What follows is a brief summary of our using a small sampling of the SCAMPER and PPCo methods.

---

We started by focusing on “Substitute” as our divergent thinking technique. We set a goal of coming up with at least five ideas (quantity) as we thought about replacing parts of Sugar with alternatives; making changes to the Journal, adding a new Sugar component, or coming up with lesson plans to suggest the use of Sugar in some more creative ways. Some of our ideas included: making a SCAMPER example from an existing activity; making SCAMPER “cards” with helper questions for each activity (in the spirit of Squeak Cards); creating a math example where we ask students to come up with multiple proofs, multiple uses, and multiple implications of each new concept; a peer-edit extension to the Write activity where the editing is focused on a SCAMPER activity; a template for the Portfolio that would encourage the use of SCAMPER to expand upon work in the Journal; using SCAMPER and PPCo to organize the bulletin board; a SCAMPER activity; SCAMPER channels in IRC; SCAMPER tags in the Journal; inter-generational SCAMPERing; a SCAMPER visualization of Journal content; and a version of sharing where those who join an activity engage in a SCAMPER or PPCo activity.

We then used PPCo to critique our ideas, using some stock questions to organize our convergent thinking activity: “How to?”, “In what ways might we?”, “How might I?”, “What are all the ways to?”

We itemized the positives of embodying SCAMPER into to sample Sugar activities:

• They would easy and quick to prototype;
• They would not be content specific;
• They would be an easy way to get the community to test the idea;
• Anyone can do it;
• It would be easy to share the results;
• They would give us a simple framework for evaluating the idea.

We also itemized the potentials of embodying SCAMPER into to sample Sugar activities:

• It might lead to some general principles in Sugar;
• It might lead to teachers reassessing their assessments;
• It might lead to more useful collaboration;
• It might make things more fun and more social;
• It might lead to more sharing and collaboration;
• it might promote more mentoring.

And we did some exaggerating:

• It might lead to more learning;
• It might lead to authentic problem-solving;
• It might lead to a world of SCAMPERing;
• It might lead to a world of learning to learn;
• SCAMPER combined with Portfolio assessment might make standarized testing obsolete.

We listed some concerns:

• What might be a way to keep SCAMPERing fresh?
• In what ways might we visualize progress?
• How might we integrate SCAMPER with the Portfolio?
• In what ways might we tell the SCAMPER story?

And we listed some ways we might overcoming one of our concerns: In what ways might we tell the SCAMPER story?

• Case study: e.g., a SCAMPERized English class;
• Stand on the work of SCAMPERers who have come before us;
• Conduct a controlled experiment;
• Sketch out specific Sugar examples;
• Create some videos of SCAMPER in action;
• Create an immersive SCAMPER experience (”show, don’t tell”);
• Create a SCAMPER Mindmap;
• Create a SCAMPER portfolio.

Finally, we made an action plan:

• Short term: research for SCAMPER examples; blog about SCAMPER to the community; create a portfolio template; make a sketch of a Journal template; and introduce SCAMPER at Sugar Camp;
• Medium term: create a SCAMPER Sugar challenge; and get SCAMPERized Sugar into the hands of teachers and learners;
• Long term: having creativity principles materialize in Sugar.

The choice of SCAMPER and PPCo were somewhat ad hoc. Nonetheless, I came away from my morning with Diego convinced that we can embody some creativity principles into Sugar to great effect.

Sugar Labs

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

The SOM for the entire month of April is here.