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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) °

Sugar Digest 2009-12-10

Sugar Digest

1. Of course the big news this week is the launch of Sugar on a Stick V2 (Blueberry). Sebastian Dziallas has done a great job of synthesizing the joint efforts of the Sugar (0.86) and Fedora (F12) communities. The new release is a huge improvement over Strawberry (our beta from last spring.) Sean Daly and the marketing team have done an outstanding job of getting the word out. There has been far-reaching coverage of the release in the press—all quite favorable. Congratulations to the Sugar Community for a great effort and wonderful results.

2. I gave the keynote at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Tuesday, where I used the occasion to formally announce the Blueberry release. This is the second year of the Summit; it is a relatively small event—about 200 attendees—but very well representative of the netbook industry, which is dominated by the European market. While I mostly discussed Sugar, it behooved me to talk a bit about the netbook industry as a whole. I picked up on a theme from my talk last year: “culture war”. Last year, I described the advantage that the netbook had over the smart phone because it was free from the restrictions placed on it by service providers (a polite term for phone companies). I predicted an explosion of innovation in the netbook market and a homogenization of the smart-phone market. Boy was I ever wrong. Netbooks, for the most part, all look the same and all offer the same functionality (Litl being a notable exception). Meanwhile, Apple and Google have turned the smart-phone industry on its head. How many “apps” are in the Apple store this week? The key in my mind was that the netbook industry has aligned itself more closely with “software as a service” proponents such as Microsoft while control of the smart phone has been wrestled away from the service providers—the consumer is (at least to some extent) the driver of change (See the discussion of the caveats associated with the “there’s an app for that” culture in an earlier posting). So my challenge to the netbook community was to invest in empowerment of the consumer to be a creator. The form factor of the netbook not only makes it better suited for netbooks than a smart-phone, but also better suited for almost any creative or expressive task. We learn through doing and the netbook can be a platform for doing.

3. In a related topic, there has been a discussion on the devel list about packaging. I’ve argued that perhaps we are not friendly enough to new (children) developers and that we should offer more on-ramps if we really want to spread the culture of doing and sharing.

4. Another interesting discussion—prompted by the inclusion of some ebooks in the Blueberry release—has been on the topic copyright. What licenses would be appropriate for material included in a Sugar release. Is the commercial vs non-commercial (NC) distinction important? Or is the most important distinction between share-alike (SA) and non derivatives (ND)? We had a good discussion on the topic at last week’s oversight board meeting (See the minutes) and will (hopefully) wrap up the discussion at this week’s meeting. Please join us at 15 UTC (10 EST) on Friday, 11 December, in #sugar-meeting on irc.freenode.net.

In the community

5. It is not too late to participate in this week’s Squeakland Book Sprint to create a Reference Manual for Etoys. You can find more information at http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Book+Sprint.

6. Steven Parrish has blogged about Sugar at FUDCon, the Fedora User and Developer Conference held this past weekend in Toronto. These opportunities for face-to-face meeting are important.

I met Sebastian Dziallas of “Sugar on a Stick” fame. Bernie Innocenti and Peter Robinson who ar both volunteers for SugarLabs. We spent some time talking Sugar and plans to evolve Sebastian’s SOAS and my “Fedora for the XO-1″ projects from Fedora Remixes to actual Spins and the work that will be involved in doing so. Sebastian and I also gave a joint talk during BarCamp on both of the afore mentioned projects.

7. Tomeu Vizoso has been representing Sugar Labs at Ceibal 09 in Uruguay. At this annual gathering of OLPC participants, Tomeu has had an opportunity to interact with both engineers and teachers. Expect details in his blog. Meanwhile, for those of you who speak Spanish, you may want to read Gonzalo Odiard’s post to the Sur list. As Gabriel Eirea notes in a reply to Gonzalo, “[that] Tomeu be invited to this event and stay working a few days represents a significant [positive] change” in the Ceibal attitude towards the community.

Help Wanted

8. Speaking of blogs, we are looking for someone who would want to take over management of Sugar Planet and to help it further flourish; we could use a new CSS and HTML templates, improved
editorial controls, new writers, etc.

Tech Talk

9. As mentioned above, Steven Parrish has been making steady progress on F11 for the OLPC XO-1.0 laptop. This effort is key to being able to run the more recent (0.84 or 0.86) versions of Sugar in Peru and Uruguay. Any help you can offer Steven (including testing) would be greatly appreciated.

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 10 December 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2009-11-30

Sugar Digest

1. We celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S. this past week. It is a time for family, food, and what we call “football” in North America. In my family, I am always tasked with making desserts: pies, cakes, tarts, and cookies. (This year, I made a pumpkin-praline pie, a pecan pie–which morphed into a pecan cobbler, a chocolate-mousse pie, a Key-Lime pie, an apple tart, a fruit tart, hermits, oatmeal cookies, and a coffee cake. I will share my recipes with anyone who is interested.)

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t cooking. It has always been an adventure because I cannot keep a recipe in my head and I cannot resist experimenting. (I should consider using a laser cutter to print the recipes on my pies.) Call it kitchen chemistry or Constructionism in the kitchen. Either way, it is authentic learning.

2. Simon Schampijer, the Sugar Release Manager, has put together a detailed set of pages in the wiki outlining our policy and process for proposing new Sugar features. “The main goal of the feature policy is to make systematic and predictable the process by which community ideas on how Sugar should evolve get transformed into actionable proposals.”

Simon and I have been discussing the scope of this policy in IRC. It is appropriate and customary for the Release Manager to set policy, but I would like to see the process followed more generally, as it provides a structure that the Activity Team can also leverage as part of the on-going Sugar activity update process. Activities updates wouldn’t be tied to Sucrose release cycle, but it provides a nice framework for community feedback and makes clear the roles of ideation, implementation, and packaging and maintenance.

(For more background on FOSS project development, check out Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software.)

In the community

3. Carlos Mauro defended his thesis this week. His topic was: Evaluación de la OLPC con Ingeniería de Usabilidad.

Help Wanted

4. Wade Brainerd has observed that while the download counts on activities.sugarlabs.org are very high, the review counts are very low. For example, Typing Turtle has nearly 50,000 downloads but only two reviews. You are encouraged to write reviews. We would especially like to hear from deployments.

In the community

5. I’ll be giving the keynote at the World Netbook Summit in Paris next week.

Tech talk

6. Simon has refined the Sugar 0.88 Roadmap A detailed discussion can be found here.

7. Aleksey Lim has been leading an interesting discussion on 0install to cover situations such as:

  • activities that have dependencies that are not included in the Sugar Platform;
  • building and installing activity-specific binaries; and
  • running non-Sugar applications that are not well packaged in GNU/Linux distributions.

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 30 November 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2009-11-23

Sugar Digest

1. When Tony Forster modified the Physics activity within 24 hours of its initial posting on activities.sugarlabs.org, it was a sign that educations, not just developers, were beginning to take a lead in determining the shape of Sugar. But even more important than contributing patches is contributing to the growing body of knowledge about how to use Sugar for learning. Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez has been an outspoken voice on the Sur list, telling stories from her classroom (Rosamel is a teacher in Uruguay) and challenging the community in regard to using technology for learning to its maximum potential. She has recently blogged about some innovative uses of Turtle Art, which naturally caught my attention, and wrote a remarkable post on the Sur list about guided discovery. It is really gratifying to hear these stories from the field.

2. We held an oversight board meeting on 20 November. We passed a motion to close the slobs@ list to just SLOBs, move current slobs@ traffic to iaep@ with a [SLOBS] subject line tag where at all possible. We also passed a motion to give a two-week deadline to the Sugar-on-a-Stick decision panel. We spend the remainder of the meeting discussing our trademark policy. We are examining the policies of other projects to get ideas about how we might amend our own policy going forward. We’ll continue the discussion on iaep@ and at the next scheduled meeting, Friday, 04 December, 2009 – 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST). Minutes and a log from the 20 November meeting are available in the wiki.

Help Wanted

3. The Sugar-on-a-Stick team is looking from someone to help them with documentation. Please contact the list (soas@) if you are interested.

4. There is interest at the ministry of education in the Republic of Macedonia in learning more about Sugar. If a quick trip to Skopje is within the realm of possibilities, please contact me.

Tech Talk

5. Erick Lavoie and the Tutorious team have put together an .iso image that is available for testing. Please download tutorius-20091118.iso from http://bobthebuilder.mine.nu/isos/. The image is based upon the soas04.iso.

To create a tutorial inside the Calculate Activity:

  1. Start the Creator by pressing the “double bubble” icon near the Tutorial list under the Activity tab;
  2. Add actions like BubbleMessage from the toolbox window shown on the right;
  3. Add events like Gtk Event Catcher (choose the “clicked” event type);
  4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until satisfied;
  5. Save;
  6. Quit

To execute the tutorial created:

  1. Close and restart the Activity;
  2. Select the tutorial from the list

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 23 November 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2009-11-16

Sugar Digest

1. I am writing this update today while waiting to see if I will called to jury duty. I was originally supposed to report last week, but a deferment was granted since I was in Bolzano. I am not sure why I had never been called before—both my wife and children have served several times. But unlike the airport in Rome, there is at least a place to sit and plug in my laptop and get on-line while I wait, so here it goes.

I was in Rome overnight in transit from Bolzano, where we held a week-long Sugar Camp. Bolzano is in South Tyrol, in the Italian Alps. The autonomous regional government is a user of free software and is exploring ways in which they can engage the FOSS community more deeply. They have a regional development organization, TIS, that fosters FOSS projects in the region, provides infrastructure and support, and an annual Free Software Week. It was in the context of Free Software Week that we came to Bolzano.

Rather than meet at TIS, we (Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Dave Farning, Sean Daly, Stefan Unterhauser (Dogi), Carlo Falciola, Adam Holt, Christian Vanizette, and I) spent the week at CTS Luigi Einaudi, a technical school a short walk from the city center. We were given a comfortable room with Internet access, just upstairs from the school’s coffee bar and next door to where the Gnome Zeitgeist team was meeting. Over the course of the week, we interacted with teachers, students, developers, and a variety of people in the region who have an interest in Sugar.

We had a busy week. My typical day was to get up at 6:00, go down stairs for an early breakfast with David, who would have already been up for at least an hour, take a 20-minute walk to the school, arriving at 8:00, in time for the first espresso of the day. We’d write code, discuss ideas, brainstorm, and write more code until 20:00, at which point we’d make a plan for dinner—usually a pizza or some knudel and the local weizenbier or a glass of lagrein. Somehow or other, we would never manage to get back to the hostel until after midnight. Pizza, Python, and friends, surrounded by the Dolomites—not a bad way to spend the week.

We made progress on the roadmap for 0.88, having brainstormed on a number of topics. The themes that rose to the top were: a simplified collaboration model; resolution of some outstanding issues regarding the Home View, e.g., how to best launch new verses resume activities; and some changes to the Journal—possibly the incorporation of versions and a better integration of the Journal into the activity workflow, e.g., making it possible to modify the description field while the activity is open. Other themes include accessibility and testing.

Simon organized the discussions through the week. He kept us focused and productive. He also got some hacking in, spending time working through many of the issues associated with providing global support for spell-check. In doing this, he’ll have laid out the framework for providing other global services.

Tomeu spend most of his week being interrupted by people asking him questions. (Five minutes of Tomeu time usually was enough to keep me busy for a few hours.) But he did manage to make progress on his work on Python introspection. This work will lead to a much more efficient use of Python modules in Sugar.

David and Dogi (working with Bernie and Aleksey from afar) did an overhaul of some of our back-end systems, which had been becoming stressed as more and more people are using Sugar. (For example, we’ve already surpassed 1.5-million downloads from activities.sugarlabs.org. It was just a few weeks ago that we reached the 1-million milestone.) They have also stream-lined the process for setting up local mirrors. We encourage you to set up a mirror in your region. (Argentina and Paraguay have recently set up mirrors.)

Carlo help us in drafting a set of guidelines by which third parties might work with Sugar Labs in establishing various value-added services to the Sugar user community. We will be discussing these guidelines over the next few weeks. We also spent time with Patrick Ohnewein from TIS to discuss opportunities specific to South Tyrol.

Sean and Christian discussed a number different opportunities regarding marketing. One idea that emerged is The Sugar Journal, along the lines of The Perl Journal, which would include articles written by teachers, developers, and other community members.

For my part, I spent most of the week sketching out some ideas. I coded up a color selector for both the control panel (it has changed a bit since I made the screencast) and the initial start screen and started coding up an activity toolbar widget for accessing the journal detail view from within an activity (as opposed to as you exit an activity), and I learned a bit more about Cairo (it uses a display list) from Tomeu in my efforts to refactor the turtle graphics with in Turtle Art.

We had a series of really good discussions with the Zeitgeist team. Their work definitely has long-term implications for the Journal and they expressed interest in making their work relevant to our needs.

We also got some help on the Record activity from Daniel Siegel, the author of Cheese diagnosed the problems we are having with Blueberry (apparently there is a Cairo bug in Fedora 12) and on the OLPC XO 1.5 hardware (there is a missing driver).

2. Before heading to Bolzano, I made a quick trip to the West Coast to give a keynote that the QT Developers Day conference. Lots of enthusiasm for Sugar and lots of work being put into Qt on small-footprint devices.

3. Eric Bachard has announced the availability of the Sugar port of OOo4Kids (Open Office for Kids). A .xo bundle should be available for download from activities.sugarlabs.org soon.

4. We had a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting last Friday in which we discussed mailing list policies. The meeting log is available in the wiki. The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 20 November 2009 at 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST).

5. The Spanish-language version of Sdenka Z. Salas Pilco’s guide to using Sugar in the classroom is available on the wiki (Please see La Laptop XO en el Aula).

In the community

6. OLPC Germany will meet in Hamburg on November 22. Please see Mitgliederversammlung 2009. Everyone interested in OLPC and Sugar is invited!

7. OLPC-San Francisco and OLPC NYC are planning community summits on November 21. Please see OLPCSF Community Summit 2009.

Tech Talk

8. Sebastian Dziallas announced that after considering input from the various teams involved in Sugar Labs and the Sugar on a Stick creation, we’re shifting the release schedule as follows:

  • 2009-11-17 Fedora 12 Final Release
  • 2009-11-29 Image Gold Master Creation & Upload
  • 2009-12-08 Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry) Public Release

Please consider Sugar on a Stick V2 to be in freeze.

Sugar Labs

9. Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past two weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM and SOM).

Posted 16 November 2009 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °