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Sugar Digest 2008-11-17

Sugar Digest

1. Planes, trains, and automobiles: While everyone else has been preparing for SugarCamp, I’ve been traveling across Europe, fulfilling some prior commitments. “If it is Monday, this must be Tampere.” I had a chance to attend a gathering of the Indo-German Business Forum (IGBF 2008) sponsored by Pratham e.V. in Düsseldorf and garnered a lot of interest in the use and support of Sugar in the subcontinent. (Pratham’s goal: “Every child in school… and learning well.”) I also had a chance to address the free software community at a meeting in Bolzano, Italy, where my theme was the why—not just the how—of Sugar and free software: the appropriation of knowledge within the context of a critical dialog is a powerful model for both learning and software development. I’m in Finland now, fulfilling my obligations as a visiting faculty member at the University of Tampere. I taught a class on journalism and open systems. (In a life before Sugar, I was the running a program at MIT called “News in the Future”.) The gist of the program was discuss: our many mistakes from the past and the opportunities afforded by open communication, open knowledge, and open media—concepts that my generation seems to struggle with, but are second nature to the youth of Finland and probably youths everywhere.

2. Regional Sugar Labs have been a topic of discussion on each stop in my travels (and also in my recent trip to Peru). A distributed project—we chose to name Sugar Labs, plural deliberately—where there is a local sense of ownership and associated entrepreneurship feels like the right course for us as an organization. Sugar Labs “central” is the community itself, which would be responsible for setting clear goals and maintaining any necessary infrastructure needed by the project as a whole, while the regional labs would use the own means to make Sugar relevant to their local communities. But what is the “business model” for a successful Sugar Lab? It seems that some necessary conditions for success would be:

  • a university connection as a local human resource
  • a local pilot user group to learn from
  • a local passion or sub-goal that provides a rational for the work

What are other considerations? And are these initial “conditions” correct?

3. The impact of Sugar: We need to be able to communicate the impact of Sugar on learning. Some measures are beginning to come in from the field, e.g., the report from Peru I cited last week, however, more concrete numbers and stories of how Sugar has positively change individual lives would be of great value to the project. The audience of these communications are the free software community, educators, educational researchers and activists, philanthropies that can help support the efforts of these groups, and organizations that want to build products or service on top of Sugar (either for or not for profit). Put your stories in the wiki or share them on the mailing lists.

4. In a related thread, Babu Ram Poudel, deputy director of the department of education in Nepal has posted a white paper entitled “On Using Digital Curriculum and OLPC in Nepal” in order to initiate discussion. I’ve asked them to post the paper in a public place so that the Sugar community can provide feedback.

5. Just because it is cool: Daniel Ajoy sent this link to the OLPC Sur list (Saturn eclipse). Wow.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

6. First National Volunteer Network Support Plan Ceibal: On November 15 there was the first national meeting of the registered volunteers (RAP) for Plan Ceibal, the Sugar/OLPC deployment in Uruguay. The meeting was attended by 300 volunteers, with representatives from 17 departments around the country. The citizens of Uruguay are very active in their efforts to ensure that their national project is a success. It is great that the project is so open to the volunteer community.

7. Sugar Camp is underway in Cambridge.

8. Mashup Camp Mountain View will be held on 17–19 November.

Sugar Labs

9. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). It is great that the peak in the center of the image is a cluster of “Sugar”, “Work”, “Make”, and “Think”.

Posted 17 November 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-11-10

Sugar Digest

1. Herramientas pedagógicas: Both Carla Gomez Monroy and María del Pilar Sáenz have drawn attention to the efforts of Telmex to prepare—and share—pedagogical materials for one-to-one computer and the use of Sugar. There is a wiki overflowing with guides, manuals, and lesson plans (See Herramientas Pedagógicas). This is a great addition to the growing body of materials for teachers, parents, and children. It complements materials being prepared in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal, et al. Please link additional materials to the growing list on the deployment page in the wiki (Deployment Guides and Sugar Manuals).

2. El Aula Telmex: Another public resource being sponsored by Telmex is Classroom Telmex (El Aula Telmex). This site is not Sugar specific, but as it grows it may too be an interesting resource for curricular and extracurricular activities.

3. Scratch Scratch?: Bill Kerr started a discussion thread about a change in the Scratch license (See Scratch license and Scratch Forum). The gist of the thread is that the right to modify Scratch has been removed from the license. We eagerly await clarification the Scratch team.

4. Making a Squeak: Meanwhile, the Squeak/Etoys team continues to wrestle with various up-steam distribution managers regarding inclusion “main”. Squeak (which also underlies Scratch) and Etoys are free software, but it seems that there remains some confusion up stream regarding accessing and modifying the source of a “loose and late binding process”. I am sure we will manage to work through these issues in order to ensure ready access to a great learning environment.

5. SVG: Bill has written a nice tutorial on using SVG in the classroom (See “Inspired by SVG”). Meanwhile, I’ve just about finished the conversion of Turtle Art to SVG: I am hoping an SVG rebase will make it easier to maintain, localize, and modify.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

6. SugarCamp: While not all of the details are in place, we will be holding a Sugar Camp in Cambridge the week of 17 November. We’ve reserved a room at the Cambridge Innovation Center—courtesy of Open Learning Exchange (OLE) beginning at noon (EST). The tentative schedule is to hold a Sugar sprint Monday and Tuesday, followed by lightening talks about new features beginning on Wednesday. A Sugar planning meeting will be held at the end of the week. See SugarCamp proposal for details as they are finalized.

Tech Talk

7. Network Manager: Simon Schampijer kept on working on the integration of NM 0.7 in sugar. He finished loading and saving of the connections, we still use the old profile format but will later probably switch to use gconf and gnme-keyring and the WPA part. He is preparing patches now for review and will keep on working on the open issues like the Frame device and auto-connection to saved connections on startup.

8. Activities: Marco Pesenti Gritti started looking into activity startup performance. From his initial measurements, it looks as if lazy import could make a difference as it seems that we are doing more syncing than importing of modules at startup. Marco also suspects that the launcher animation is “slowing things down a lot.”

Marco also spent time discussing (with Gary Martin, Greg Dekoenigsberg, and Eduardo Silva) how to better handle activity upstream releases.

9. Testing meeting: Mel Chua organized a “great” testing meeting. The Testing Team section of the wiki is starting to come into focus.

10. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser has made a new version of the XO-LiveCD. You can download it from: XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch, Build 767. The CD contains many activities, including all of the “G1G1″ bundle. Further information is available in the PDF document: XO-LiveCD_081106.pdf.

Sugar Labs

11. Reorg: Tomeu Vizoso is now our Joyride master, while Simon continues to lead the release team.

12. wiki.suagrlabs.org: Greg and David Farning have been making great strides on Sugar Labs teams and the wiki. Greg had some suggestions for better organizing the teams that have had immediate impact and resulted in a great deal of follow-up. David has done some major cleaning up of the wiki (as reflected in the new sidebar organization). Hopefully it is easier to navigate, easier to find the information you seek, and more obvious where and how to contribute.

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

Posted 10 November 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (2) °

Sugar Digest 2008-11-04

Sugar Digest

1. Peru by the numbers: It has only been a few months, but the early indications are quite positive regarding the one-to-one laptop program in Peru.

  • 40013 computers delivered to students and teachers
  • 2140 teachers of 569 educational institutions trained
  • 100000 computers in the process of delivery
  • 8000 teachers in training process
  • 150000 computers will be delivered in 2009

A preliminary survey of students of primary schools in rural areas suggests:

Evidence of increased motivation

  • The students care about what they are doing.
  • The students feel the endeavor to learn more and discover new experiences is worthwhile.
  • The students experience a high degree of interest in attending school.
  • The students feel the satisfaction of doing something they like.
  • The students feel the joy discovering.

Evidence of a new relationship to learning

  • The students feel an increased creative tension because they feel that should and need to learn.
  • The students feel an increased responsibility to be attentive and disciplined in class.
  • The students are “committing themselves”—facing the challenge of new knowledge.
  • The students are cognizant that they “have a lot more to learn and what they know is” not sufficient.
  • The students have a remarkable rapprochement with their teachers.
  • The students have an increased confidence and security and an improvement in their interpersonal relationships.
  • The students feel that their opinions and ideas are important.
  • The students are free to decide what to do and show more initiative and creativity.

Evidence of academic achievement

  • Improved reading comprehension with respect to national standards.

It is too soon to tease out all of the factors that have contributed to this changes, but unequivocally, the children of Peru are seizing the opportunity. I look forward to more comprehensive data from the field.

2. Questioning “General” Education: Marvin Minsky has written another essay in his series about how our computers could help to advance our children’s educational development. The new essay begins with a quote from George Pólya.

It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five different problems one way.

See Memo 4. Previous essays are at Minsky Essays.

3. Knight News Challenge: Sugar Labs applied for four Knight Foundation grants (all four are linked to from the Deployment page).

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

4. OLPC France: Lionel Laské announced OLPC CodeCamp in Paris on 15 November (See CodeCamp). Five workshops are planned:

  • Sugar: development and experimentation on Sugar/Python;
  • School Server: setting up and test of school server on multiple platform (standard PC, Booba server, CherryPal, etc.);
  • Mono: development of new activities using Mono;
  • Pedagogic usage: Feedbacks from Haiti, Ethiopia and Palestine deployment; Brainstorming with French teachers to find usage and class activity;
  • French localization: French translators will work all the days to translate in French, Sugar, activities and FLOSS manual.

5. Sugar camp: There will be a gathering in Cambridge, MA the week of 17 November (See proposal).

Tech Talk

6. 0.84 Release cycle: Simon Schampijer and the release team have gotten the Sucrose Development 0.83.1 Release out the door (See 0,83.1). This is the first of the 0.84 cycle. The code base has seen many refactoring efforts: To improve performance several heavy shell dependencies have been dropped; the Journal and the shell service have been merged into the shell. The datastore has been rewritten (simplified) to improve maintainability while keeping the same API in place. We are now using Gconf to store the Sugar profile. Some enhancements have been made to the clipboard to provide visual consistency with the Sugar environment. Also, Sugar modules are being marked as STABLE / UNSTABLE / DEPRECATED (See API Policy). And of course many many bugs have been fixed. Thanks to all who have been contributing to this new release.

7. Network Manager: Simon and Marco Pesenti Gritti have been working on the integration of NM 0.7 into Sugar. This will be of particular importance to facilitating network connectivity on non-OLPC-XO-1 platforms.

8. Usability testing : Carlos Mauro has been working on a measurement of usability and the development of a standard process for measurement for Sugar and Sugar Activities.

9. Presence service: A new release of Presence Service is available (source). Enhancements include improved interoperability with non-Sugar clients and integration with gconf.

10. Browse-100: Simon, Marco, and Tomeu Vizoso are happy to announce the 100th version of the Browse Activity! New features include better download/upload support. (Note: Browse-100 is dependent on the latest hulahop v0.4.7).

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 04 November 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar § learning ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-10-27

Sugar Digest

1. Lima: Sugar was well represented in Peru this past week. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva organized a translation sprint at the University San Martin de Porres. SJ Klein and C. Scott Ananian then joined them to run a Game Jam. The week culminated with a Freedom and Open Source Day, in which we were joined by many members of the Peruvian Free Software community, including Nicolas Valcárcel from the Ubuntu community. My talk at the conference was titled “What the learning community can learn from Free Software.” One of my slides made the point that sostenibilidad ≠ sustentabilidad. Both words translate into “sustainability” in English, but Dr. Arq. Guillermo E. Gonzolo from CEEMA in Argentina pointed out the subtle distinction to me—one that I find quite interesting: sostenibilidad is static; sustenabilidad is dynamic. Putting XP on laptops is about maintaining the status quo (sostenibilidad), while Linux, which is at the beginning rather than end of its life cycle is where the true “unlimited potential” can be found (sustenabildad). I’ll post my slides on the wiki when I get a chance.

2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what benefits would it bring? I was asked this two-part question from a software developer. The Sugar Almanac is a good starting point for answering the first part (Sugar Almanac). The second part is complex and rather than giving a glib answer, I want to take some time to give it some thought. The obvious answer, the chance to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, is OK, but I think we need to develop more of a case.

3. Deployment roadmap: David Farning is developing a deployment roadmap with the goal to make Sugar and Sugar Activities “freely and readily available to learners everywhere.” Sounds good to me. (See Deployment Roadmap).

4. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks has been maintaining a page in the wiki tracking our progress with developing a turnkey USB key solution for schools (See School Key
).

5. Printing: Printing was hotly debated on the Sugar list (Printing). There were two discussions: Should Sugar support printing and How should Sugar support printing. It seems that there is not consensus on the first question—it isn’t clear that there needs to be. (Printing is not a realistic option in the Peru deployment, but that shouldn’t preclude its use in other places, necessarily. To me, the most compelling argument in favor of printing that was put forth is it lets you put the work of the students on display.) As to how to do it, there is the question of what affordances we should be providing (in which Activities) and whether or not we should be supporting network printing vs the installation of print drivers. The latter question is more of a distribution question than one for Sugar to resolve.

6. Feedback from Peruvian Ministry of Education: C. Scott Ananian and I made multiple visits to the MEC office in Lima to discuss Sugar 0.82 and the OLPC XO deployment. We got some great feedback, including a healthy list of bugs, one of the most pressing being that audio files are seemingly not importing properly when trying to create a new game in the Memorize Activity. The reason this is important is that Memorize is a nice tool introducing letter and word sounds to new readers. Another bug—or point of confusion—was in regard to how the Record Activity is saved to the Journal. Record sessions and photos created by Record both show up when doing an image search in the Journal. This is fine when in browsing within the Journal itself, but caused confusion when trying to import an image into Write. If you tried to import a session instead of a photo, the import failed.

It was nice to hear that was there was a distinct impression (from the user perspective) that “it is faster!!” In general the new Home View was well received: One simple idea we explored together was the use of the list view “star” option to restrict the number of Activity icons appearing on the Home View. This lets a teacher focus the class on a small set of Activities related to the goals being set for the students. It may be possible to have different collections of Activities tagged in the Journal for easy maintenance of such a scheme.

The pedagogical team at the ministry has been developing some beautiful curricula guides for Sugar. They describe projects that encompass multiple activities towards a common goal, such as creating a newspaper or a story about your community. The guides are targeting different skill levels and they beautifully illustrate pedagogical goals without being overly prescriptive. The multi-page guides are intended for teachers. Single-page instructions are also being created for students. As they complete a few more, they will make them available for downloading.

7. ¿Qué? ¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? ¿Para qui?: We also discussed the role that a portfolio might play in Sugar. What? How? Why? For who? are questions that are part of the teacher/student discourse in Peru. They are also questions that are important to the “select-reflect-perform” cycle of portfolio assessment. Scott, Rafael, Sebastian and I spend quite a bit of time discussion possible approaches to building a Portfolio Activity (we agreed that it makes sense to make it a separate Activity from the Journal for the time being). My hair-brained idea is to make a Turtle-Art-like snap-together programing Activity to create narrative presentations from items selected from the Journal. I’ll make some sketches in the coming days and post them to the wiki. The team at the ministry was very upbeat about portfolio tools, regardless of the implementation details.

8. Thin and fat clients: Brendan R. Powers from Resara has taken an interest in Sugar. Resara deploys Linux desktop solutions in schools in the United States. Brendon believes that Sugar’s collaboration tools, Journal and other features “could be very appealing to younger grade (elementary and middle school) students and teachers.” We’ll be exploring how to use Sugar on some of the classrooms already on their thin client desktops.

9. On collaboration: Juliano Bittencourt has stirred the pot regard the Sugar collaboration model. In a discussion on the developers mailing list (On collaboration) he raises the issue of synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration, arguing that too much emphasis has been given over to the former, when the latter is generally more useful in a school setting. I agree with him to a great extent. There are not too many learning scenarios that I am aware of where a tightly coupled synchronous interaction is critical. Exceptions of course include Chat—which can be used as a group storytelling medium and an medium through which other collaborations are staged and organized—and include some of the activities around real-time picture sharing and other data-gathering exercises, such as the use of Measure or Distance. Etoys also has a number synchronous modes that are rich, including the ability to share both objects and a workspace. The peer-to-peer editing in the Write Activity may not require synchrony: children could trade documents, edit, and then pass them back. But the feature has been used creatively for other narrative purposes. And of course, there are lots of great games that require some level of synchrony, so the effort that has gone into this layer of the infrastructure will continue to be of value.

To some extent, Juliano’s point was less in regard to synchrony and more in regard to the lack of any means within Sugar to maintain persistence of a collaboration over a longer time frame than a single interactive session. This omission is will in part be filled by services external to Sugar, such as Moodle or AMADIS. However, some aspects of the yet-to-be-implemented Bulletin Board would also meet these needs. (Better versioning in the Journal/Datastore—in the roadmap for 0.84—will play a role as well.) The Bulletin Board is designed to be a place for the persistent sharing of objects and actions between a group of collaborators. In some sense, one could think of it as a share, persistent clipboard. Bulletin Boards would be created in support of group projects that involve multiple activities and multiple sessions. We should develop a requirements document and architectural description of what is needed in order to both best leverage existing tools and set realistic goals for any Sugar developments.

10. PlayGo: Paul Barchilon provided some very thoughtful feedback on the PlayGo Activity. What struck me was that he kept returning to how various design decisions impact the opportunity for children to engage in learning (See PlayGo feedback).

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

11. Lima translation sprint: We gathered at the University of San Martin de Porres for two intense days. Through the courtesy of the OLPC foundation, Sugar Labs, and USMP, we had the opportunity to meet for a few days of translation work. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva provided the logistical support. We worked shoulder to shoulder alongside community volunteers, as well as a team distributed collaborators who made their contributions both at headquarters at the university and via the Internet from different parts of Peru.

The distance work was made possible by our infrastructure collaboration, IRC, mailing lists, and especially the parallel translation tool available in FLOSS Manuals, which allows you to drag and drop text and images between documents. One challenge we had was to regenerate many of the screenshots of Sugar containing text in English. (There is more work to do.)

The team would like to take this opportunity to thank Sr. Hernan Pachas and Engineer Waldy Grandez of University San Martin de Porres for all their help in organizing the event, publicity, support, snacks and Peruvian entertainment. See our work in Sugar_es and please lend a hand in completing the work.

Tech Talk

12. NetworkManager 0.7: Marco Pesenti Gritti and Simon Schampijer worked on porting Sugar to NetworkManager 0.7. They made lots of progress and now have something “sort of” functional. They still need to get security handling in shape (e.g., WEP), implement settings persistence and reimplement frame devices. (Someone also need to port our mesh patches to 0.7 before we can add UI for them.)

13. Developer tools: Marco started writing some release automation scripts and wrote a script to a mock build of sugar-jhbuild for easier testing on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. He switched jhbuild and buildbot away from Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.04 as the glib they provide is now too old. And he managed to get new SLiM (a simple login manager) into Fedora Rawhide. We need to build a new LiveCD with selinux enabled. Next week Marco plans to mark existing public API as stable/unstable/deprecated, get activities rpms reviewed, and create a new LiveCD.

14. Sugar improvements: Marco investigated Browse/Firefox memory issues and posted a summary on the mailing lists. Kernel hackers help needed! He also finished up a zoom-levels refactoring: He got rid of the annoying flickering. He and Tomeu Vizoso have been looking into drawing performance. They plan to start seriously working on performance next week. Marco also did some shell code refactoring.

15. XOCamp: Marco has written three proposals for the November XOCamp. (I am working on one for the Portfolio as well.) There are many more being posted on the Sugar and Devel lists.

16. Gentoo: Aleksey Lim has posted instructions for building Sugar on Gentoo (See Gentoo).

17. Ejabberd: Jonas Smedegaard reports that Ejabberd has had the patches applied for some time now on Debian. In other words, “the next stable release of Debian will support Sugar out of the box.” So will the next release of Ubuntu (Intrepid) due to release this week, as they borrow these patches from Debian (Morgan Collett has written up the much simpler process of getting ejabberd up and running at Installing ejabberd on Debian).

18. Gnash: Rob Savoye has new rpms for Gnash available for testing (“for the brave at heart”).

#!/bin/sh
# install livna
sudo yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm

# install ffmpeg from livna
sudo yum install -y ffmpeg

# get rid of the old build of 0.8.3
sudo rpm -ev gnash gnash-plugin

# install gnash
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-20081025-1.i386.rpm

# install the plugin
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-plugin-20081025-1.i386.rpm

19. Other software releases this week include:

  • TurtleArt-13.xo
  • HablarConSara-1.xo

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 27 October 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar § learning ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-10-20

Sugar Digest

1. Digital media and learning competition: I submitted a proposal to the DML competition. The gist of our project plan is to reach out to and support the Sugar community of educators and software developers. We are seeking resources to expose more teachers and learners to the features and benefits of Sugar and further enable its use by: (1) stabilizing the software to the point where it is turnkey; (2) working with and learning from diverse communities that seek better ways to educate children; and (3) growing the number of users of and contributors to Sugar. I made a similar proposal to the Google 10^100 program; the focus is on building our developer and user communities.

2. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks and I visited a Boston public school to discuss with them the possibility of piloting a USB Sugar deployment, where the children would use USB sticks to boot Sugar at school and at home, using whatever computers are available. This deployment enables a school to use Sugar without making an upfront investment in new computers. It could be a very cost-effective approach to bootstrapping Sugar communities.

3. Daniel Ajoy has updated a number of links on the OLPC Sur page that point to pages that detail various Activities as they are being applied in the classroom.

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

4. Peru translation sprint: A number of us are in Lima (beginning Monday—today—at 15:30 UTC at USMP FIA) this week, working on the translation of the Sugar-related FLOSS manuals. We’ll try to have a prense on IRC (irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting and #olpc-content) during the sprint.

5. XOcamp2: C. Scott Ananian has been organizing a week of planning for the next OLPC XO release (9.1) to be held the week of November 17 in Cambridge, MA. He’d like participation and talk proposals from the Sugar Labs developers/users (the timing would be aligned with our 0.84 Release). Talk proposals should be sent to devel at lists.laptop.org.

Tech Talk

6. Sugar labs: David Van Assche reports that he has managed to get Sugar and collaboration via eJabbers working on a Linux terminal server (LTSP) using Ubuntu (a tip of the hat to those who offered their help on the #sugar channel). This means that you can now convert an existing networked lab to Sugar without installing any software on the client terminals. See LTSP Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid for a step-by-step guide. It should be easily replicated on other distributions by using a distro-specific package manager.

7. Journal: C. Scott has been working on a new design for the Journal (See Journal Reloaded). Lots of good ideas about making the Journal generally more friendly to users, developers, and to legacy applications.

8. GConf: Simon Schampijer has been landing the use of GConf for the profile in sugar-jhbuild to store preferences (See GConf). The old API in Sugar/profile has been kept around so as not to break older Activities—for example to request the nickname or the icon colors of the user. An advantage of the new scheme is that you can run multiple instances of the emulator by repeated issuing of the ‘SUGAR_PROFILE=username sugar-emulator’ command. This works because we use gconf-dbus in sugar-jhbuild and therefore run one gconf daemon per instance.

9. NetworkManager: Simon is working on adopting the Sugar shell to use NetworkManager 0.7 during the next week (See Dan William’s blog).

10. Potpourri: As usual, Marco Pesenti Gritti has been busy; he:

  • wrote a proposal about an API stability policy for Glucose; discussed in the Sugar meeting, approved with minor improvements; Marco will make the necessary changes and officially post it on the wiki;
  • fixed various issues regarding the running of multiple Browse instances; file pickers and downloads are now opened in the correct window;
  • started to refactor the zoom-levels part of the window-management logic based on a patch by Benjamin Schwartz to get rid of flickering in the Home View;
  • poked OLPC distro developers about the Fedora-10 migration (Marco hopes we can make a call about it soon, because he’d like to use the GTK/GIO API to implement standard-compliant startup notification)l
  • thought about making the Sugar shell more standards compliant to better host legacy desktop applications; Sayamindu Dasgupta has volunteered to help—we are still looking for someone to take over the work of choosing and adapting a window manager to replace Matchbox.
  • discussed the next generation Journal design with C. Scott and was happy to see that middle layer between Journal and file system was not dropped; they made a lot progress on syncing on how to gradually integrate it in Sugar;
  • fixed various regressions from the the Sugar shell refactoring (Marco thanks everyone for the patience); and
  • made some Fedora LiveCD improvements—in particular get SLiM (a simple login manager) to behave under selinux.

His pans for next week include:

  • adding window management items to the 0.84 roadmap;
  • following up with Benjamin about the icon cache, hopefully get near to something that can be integrated;
  • looking into the LiveCD feedback (the principle blocker is NM 0.7 support, which Simon is working on;
  • figuring out where and how to host source-code releases in preparation for 0.83.1 and starting to automating them;
  • sending a reminder about new activity proposals to make sure no one is missing the deadline;
  • finishing up zoom level refactoring and getting rid of the annoying flicker;
  • trimming down the review queue; and
  • reviewing and posting the API policy on the wiki.

11. Sceencast: Chris Ball has revisited the question of how to do a Screencast in Sugar. He has written a new version of the Screencast Activity (Screencast-1.xo). An old version, built by MediaMods, is here (Screencast-2.xo).

12: Other software releases this week include:

  • Jukebox-3.xo

Gadget 0.0.2 has been released. Highlights of the “Monster Lake” release include:

  • support for constraining activity search results;
  • various bug fixes;
  • the addition of load simulation tools for testing purposes; and
  • support for multi-criteria search.

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 20 October 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-10-13

Sugar Digest

1. Collect, Select, Reflect: I had a timely visit from Prof. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis this week. Stefanakis is the author of Multiple Intelligences and Portfolios: a Window into the Learner’s Mind. We met to discuss ways in which we could further the support for portfolio assessment within the context of a Sugar deployment. Some of her observations include that a portfolio is not just a collection of work, but also a way of organizing that work into a presentation. (Note the obvious connection to the heated discussions on narrative and the Journal/datastore.) We discussed a number of simple scaffolds that we could add either directly to the Journal or build into a Portfolio Activity, for example, the inclusion of a “who am I?” section, where the learner is prompted to describe who they are across a multitude of perspectives: who am I as a linguist… as an artist… as a friend… We also discussed how we could enhance the use of tags by prompting the learner when their work is saved: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Is it portfolio worthy? Providing some structure—with multiple entry-points—helps bootstrap the portfolio process. We should consider different structures for different levels of development within the early, elementary, and middle-school years. A “Madlibs”-like format—that can be reauthored by a teacher or student—may be a reasonable place to start. Also, a scaffolding that encourages periodic review would also be beneficial to the learner. We plan to come up with a more tangible set of design criteria in the coming weeks. But it is helpful to discuss the Journal as a tool for reflection, not just as a replacement for the file system.

2. LiveCD/LiveUSB updates: Carolyn Meeks and Marco Pesenti Gritti continue to work on improvements to the bootable Sugar USB. Marco has a new Fedora-based LiveCD image (http://www.sugarlabs.org/~marco/sugar-livecd-1marco.iso) and is working on a CD that will launch a USB image (since many older machines are not configured by default to boot off of a USB drive). Sebatian Dziallas and Luke Macken have created an updated version of the Fedora/Sugar LiveCD (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/sugar-spin.iso and has made a LiveUSB creator available (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip)—you can run liveusb-creator on Windows XP to generate the latest Sugar spin on a USB key. Meanwhile, Carolyn continues to visit schools, testing builds, and gathering data as to the best ways to do simple, low-risk Sugar deployments in schools without the resources to buy dedicated laptops.

3. Roadmaps: David Farning is developing a community roadmap for Sugar (to complement the development roadmap—see Release Roadmap). David has begun with a list of features that are important for the future growth of Sugar Labs: vision, distribution, deployment, quality assurance, and infrastructure. Please help us fill in the schedule in the wiki (Community Roadmap).

4. Blogs: The teachers in Uruguay are getting more active with their blogs about using Sugar in the classroom. Their goal is to share experiences (http://ceibalpuertosauce.blogspot.com/ is but one of many examples). Add you Sugar-related blog to the list (Community Blogs).

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

5. Sugar calendars: We’ve added the developer meetings to the Sugar meetings calendar; there is also now a Sugar Labs events calendar for meetings, meet ups, sprints, etc. For information about how to access these calendars, please see the Community page (Community Calendar) in the wiki.

6. Lima translation sprint: 20–21 October in Lima, Perú at at the Universidad San Martin, Faculta de Ingeniería. (Av. La Fontana - Urbanización Santa Patricia - Distrito: La Molina) Please contact Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero for more details.

Tech Talk

7. Sugar API: Marco Pesenti Gritti, speaking on behalf of the deployment team, has announced plans for refactoring and stabilizing our public API. Please join the discussion at the next developer meeting (irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting Thursday, 16 October 2008, 14:00 UTC).

8. gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working on the transition to gconf. He will land it in the next days. He also fixed the ‘Reset Registration with school servers’ now completely #7764.

9. Upstream: Pyxpcom has been enabled in the Fedora 10 xulrunner thanks to Cristopher Aillon. Marco has synced the xulrunner olpc3 package and fixed the hulahop package accordingly to these changes. Simon has built the browse activity for fedora rawhide.

10. Sucrose 0.82 on Ubuntu: Morgan Collett has been working on the Sugar Ubuntu packages; they have been updated to the latest 0.82 release in the Sugar Team PPA. Some activities are still being updated at the moment, but should be up to date in the next few days. Installation instructions:

 sudo -s
 echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/ubuntu hardy main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sugar.list
 apt-get update
 apt-get install sugar sugar-emulator sugar-activities

A more up-to-date version of Sugar on Ubuntu is available if you add the repository for Sugar 0.82 as described here.

Luke Faraone has been triaging Sugar-related bugs in Ubuntu’s Launchpad. Along with Morgs, he is a driving force behind the the effort to get Sugar into the Ubuntu 8.10.

11. Sugar modules: There is time until 29 October to propose new modules, and new activities in particular, to be part of the 0.84 release. If you are an activity maintainer and would like to propose its inclusion please send mail to the Sugar list as per the instructions (Module Release).

12. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

  • Chat-48.xo
  • Browse-99.xo
  • Moon-8.xo
  • video-chat-9.xo
  • panorama-1.xo

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 13 October 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-10-06

Sugar Digest

1. Peer-to-peer editing: After my call last week for a social-networking site for peer-to-peer editing, I was directed by Joshua Pritikin to the Peer Editing Exchange.

I tried it out and got good and timely feedback regarding my copy (a Letter to the Editor):

What would Josh Billings say about Gov. Palin?

The great American humorist Josh Billings once said: “The problem
ain’t what you don’t know, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”
Governor Palin has Billings’s Billings’ folksy charm. But charm, but
gosh darnit, darn it, her problems include both what
she don’t know and what she knows that ain’t so. McCain has
shown reckless judgment in choosing her as a VP candidate.
It may get him elected, but since we will live with
this decision long after the election, it weighs ominously on the
prospects of a McCain administration.

Alas, the Globe didn’t publish my letter.

The workflow is reasonable, but ideally, it would be integrated into a blog tool chain where the “Publish” button us replaced with a “Send to Editor” button. What is the best free software blog tool?

2. Narrative: Bryan Barry and Michael Stone have initiated a discussion about inadequacies in the Sugar tool chain (See Narrative and Narrative).

Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
learning.—Bryan Barry

This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.
—Michael Stone

I questioned the dichotomy between manipulating narratives and modes for discovery. When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a scaffolding for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting. Manipulating narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does collaboration). We don’t yet support (natively) much in the way of organizing data to make an analysis or argument. But it seems overstated to say that these deficiencies mean Sugar is not appropriate for learning. There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar to help teachers answer the question of how one best leverages the Sugar toolkit for learning. And undoubtedly, there is a dearth of readily packaged and categorized content. But I don’t see these as fundamental flaws in Sugar as much as a place where more effort needs to be invested; Sugar is reaching a point of maturity where such investments make sense. Sugar is an appropriate component of what needs to be a larger learning ecosystem.

3. Trying Sugar at school: Caroline Meeks and I went to a computer lab at a Boston public school to see what constraints we might encounter in using some of the various LiveCD and LiveUSB efforts underway. Our goal of is to make it easy for teachers to try Sugar in situations where the school computers are locked down or cannot be reimaged. Another use case is for children to use Sugar at school and at home using a LiveUSB in cases where 1-to-1 solutions are not available: the USB key “becomes the Sugar computer”.

They school had a room full of Compaq Pentium 4 “EVO” desktops with 256M of DRAM. We tried a variety of LiveCDs (with and without Sugar). Bottom line: we have a ways to go before we have a turnkey solution. We had trouble running most of the distributions we tried (with and without Sugar). Puppy Linux was the most promising in that it boot consistently and seemed stable running as a LiveCD.

Sebastian Dziallas has built a slimmer version of the Fedora/Sugar Live spin and is working on getting it integrated into a Windows-based installer. We look forward to trying it.

4. Nepal evaluation: A summary of a Formative Evaluation of OLPC Project Nepal is online. Uttam Sharma, a doctoral student at at the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota carried out the evaluation, which has suggestions for how to improve the Sugar/one-to-one laptop deployment process.

5. Pythagoras: There is a nice summary of the various approaches to exploring the Pythagorean theorem in TurtleArt, Etoys, and Dr Geo.

6. Sugar logo: I’ve updated the wiki with the new logo (thanks to Christian Schmidt). We had asked by OLPC to stop using the XO logo—a request we have complied with.

Community jams, meet ups, and meetings

7. Meeting schedule: I’ve set up a public Google calendar for scheduling Sugar meetings. Please see Meetings for links to the XML, iCal, and HTML versions of the calendar, or search for “Sugar Labs meetings” from the Google calendar interface. If you’d like write permission on the calendar, please send me an email.

8. Spanish book sprint: We’ll be holding a translation sprint for the Sugar FLOSS Manual in Lima, Perú on 20, 21 October at the Universidad San Martin, Faculta de Ingeniería. (Av. La Fontana - Urbanización Santa Patricia - Distrito: La Molina) Please contact Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero for more details.

9. Traduction de la documentation: Samy Boutayeb reports that OLPC France has launched a French localize project.

Tech Talk

10. Gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working to moving to gconf to store the Sugar settings. Memory consumption looks good from a first glance. The old profile will be converted on update and the old profile API will be kept around during the transition phase.

11. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

  • Jukebox-2.xo
  • ImageViewer-2.xo

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 06 October 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

Sugar Digest 2008-09-30

Sugar Digest

First, an aside: I introduced the concept of peer editing in the FLOSS Manual on the Write Activity by referencing the late Don Murray, who taught generations of journalists how to write. He had three simple rules for great writing:

  1. revise
  2. revise
  3. revise

Revision is an essential part of the writing process and one of the easiest and most effective ways to revise is to share the burden of editing among your friends. Hand your writing to a friend, who will read it and make comments and suggestions. You return the favor by doing the same for your friend’s writing.

While riding my bike into Cambridge yesterday, it occurred to me that a simple peer-editing exchange for bloggers would be easy to set up; it could make a world of difference in the quality of the writing, while not in any way impinging upon the freedom and spontaneity that characterizes the blogshpere. In deed, I am of the opinion that one of the biggest differences between blogging and the mainstream media is the strong editorial tradition of the latter.

So why doesn’t someone set up a social-networking site—ideally integrated with the popular tools such as Word Press—to enable bloggers to find a willing peer to suggest revisions before the publish button is pressed (a “Send to editor” button)? Such an exchange need not be symmetric—some people prefer the role of critic to creator; it would be a simple, powerful enhancement to the blogsphere. (Or does such a site already exist?)

1. Open Minds: David Farning and I had the opportunity to attend the Open Minds conference in Indianapolis this past weekend. It was refreshing to spend time with so many teachers passionate for learning and creating opportunities for their students. I tried to tune into discussions about the various roadblocks that inhibit the introduction of technology into schools and into classrooms. The list is pretty long and some of the items are formidable, but nonetheless, there are obvious needs and teachers and administrators who are fighting for change. There was lots of interest in Sugar—teachers and administrators are looking for an easy (and inexpensive) way to try it in their classrooms.

A few specific outcomes from the conference: Nate Ridderman will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in an elementary school in Indianapolis that is doing a one-to-one laptop experiment; David and I will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in a Boston public school that trying to make use of some old Pentium IV desktop machines; we also discussed making Sugar available as part of the offerings from some hardware OEMs who focus on the education market, including 2goPC and Resara (who offer a thin-client solution).

2. LiveUSB: It seems that a LiveUSB offers the most simple way to experience Sugar on a preexisting hardware base, such as a school computer lab. (One advantage of a LiveUSB approach—where user data is stored in a disk partition—is that the same key can be used at school and at home, emulating the experience of a one-to-one laptop program, where the laptops go home with the children. The Fedora team has made progress on a LiveUSB this week (See Item 11 below) and we are also working to get “fresher” Sugar bits into the Ubuntu LiveUSB. However, there remains a problem in that many computers do not have boot-from-USB enabled in the BIOS. Steve Pomeroy suggested we look into U3, a proprietary method of launching applications from a USB key. This would provide a work-around for running Sugar on machines that are running Windows (alas, this accounts for the majority of hardware found in schools). Ben Schwartz pointed out that we could do the same thing using autorun.inf (See autorun an executable from a USB key in Windows XP), launching an instance of Sugar in QEMU. Running Sugar in emulation requires a reasonably fast machine in order to give an acceptable experience. We need to do more testing in this arena, as it is a path of least resistance for teachers and parents who are interested in trying Sugar.

3. Teachers/developers: There was a productive discussion on the IAEP list this week about how to better engage teachers in the Sugar developer community. Rob Costello pointed out that only a small percentage of teachers would participate in the actual development process, building bridges to even that small group would be worthwhile. It was pointed out that the Patching Turtle Art (which is still incomplete) is far from meeting the needs of a teacher (or anyone else new to the community). Bill Kerr wrote up some questions that I tried to answer in the wiki (See Talk):

  • Where do you find things (Python files, source code)
  • Which things do what? How does one know which Python files have to be tweaked?
  • Who do you communicate with? (Who are the maintainers and how do you content them?)
  • How do you program more advanced stuff in Python, e.g., using lambda?
  • What is FOSS etiquette, how do you go about learning to be a member of this community?

I repeat here my answer to Bill’s last question:

“Start by asking questions… welcome to the community!”

Bill also wrote more generally about what it means to join a community, summarizing James Gee from his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003), drawing a distinction between knowledge and being part of a community of knowledge:

  • we learn to experience the world in a new way: see, feel and operate on;
  • we gain the potential to join a new social group, a new club;
  • we gain the resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in a new domain and perhaps related domains.

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

6. Sugar meetings: The deployment team will be meeting on Wednesday at 14 UTC (10 EST) on irc.freenode.net (channel: #sugar-meeting). The oversight board will be meeting on Friday at 14 UTC (10 EST), also on #sugar-meeting.

Tech Talk

7. Release candidate: For those of you with OLPC-XOs, Michael Stone has released a candidate build (766) that incorporates Sugar .082. It is well worth the hassle of updating from 652 or 711.

8. Tricks: Michael also posted a list of “idioms” that he relies on in order to make his software-development efforts more predicable and robust (See Mstone Tricks).

9. Sugar control panel: Simon Schampijer speed up control panel start up in 0.84. The next issues he want to tackle are better localizations in the panel for the available languages and switching to gconf (if tests show it is worth it).

10. Bugsquad: Simon had also setup the Sugarlabs Bugsquad, the quality assurance (QA) team for Sugar. The squad will triage bugs, set priorities, verify usability and test cases. Furthermore it does coordinate testing, does testing itself and help setting up bug infrastructure, i.e., trac components (See BugSquad).

11. Sugar Live CDs: Greg Dekoenigsberg reports progress on a Fedora Live CD/USB based on rawhide/F10. He has a LiveCD for Fedora 10 devel (Rawhide) that allows a Sugar 0.82 boot option via GDM. Activiites are still missing, but Greg says that we will close this gap quickly. There is also a kickstart file that can be used by any Fedora user to generate such an image trivially (See Introduction for some background on Fedora kickstarts). Also, see liveusb-creator for help on making a Windows-bootable LiveUSB for Fedora.

Bryan Kearney built a virtual image for the Sugar rawhide package. To use it: (1) download sugar-rawhide.tgz; (2) uncompress the .tgz file; and (3) run the command:
virt-image sugar-rawhide.xml

12. Telepathy goes upstream: In their newest release (2.24), GNOME announced “the inclusion of an instant messaging client based off the Telepathy communications framework.” Whereas Sugar uses Telepathy, this means that there will likely be many non-Sugar users, adding to the community of support for the project. This is a big step towards longer-term stability, support, and general acceptance of all of our efforts. Congratulations!

13. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

  • Terminal-18
  • Write-60
  • Calculate-25
  • PlayGo-5
  • Moon-7
  • Measure-21

14. ImageViewer: Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote a new Activity to let you view images from the Journal. It supports zoom and rotation as well. Download it from ImageViewer-1.xo; the source is in git (imageviewer-activity;a=tree)

15. DrGeoII: Hilaire Fernandes announced a new DrGeoII release with macro-construction and Smalltalk scripting, plus tons of bugs fixes. The new DrGeoII distribution is based on an universal one-clic distribution for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSX (Please visit DrGeo web page to learn more). Hilaire is also discussing with the Etoys team the possibility of adding DrGeoII to the Supplies flap.

16. Etoys project sharing: Daniel Ajoy inquired about uploading Etoys projects to the Internet. While the “core” Etoys team doesn’t have a world-writable project-sharing site, they do recommend tools for setting up regional sites. To set up your own server, the simplest thing is to set up the SuperSwiki2 server.

17. Debian jhbuild: The Debian team has done a thorough job of documenting the process of building a Sugar environment on a Debian GNU/Linux distribution (See Jhbuild/Debian).

Sugar Labs

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

Posted 30 September 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar § learning ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-09-22

Sugar Digest

1. Trisecting angles: The French mathematician Évariste Galois published three papers in 1830 that laid the foundations of an algebraic proof of why is it not possible to trisect every angle in a compass and straightedge construction, something the Ancient Greeks knew, but could not prove. However, what is often overlooked is that the Greeks could trisect angles, using a different set of instruments. What does this history lesson have to do with Sugar Labs? Two separate but related discussions have dominated the OLPC-Sur list this past week: the Microsoft announcement regarding a Windows XP pilot in Peru and the lack of a square root function in Turtle Art, both of which can be seen through the lens of abstract algebra—apologies in advance for overreaching with this analogy.

Let me summarize the Turtle Art discussion first. Some teachers in Uruguay are teaching the Pythagorean Theorem and were stymied by the lack of a square root function in Turtle Art. They wanted to demonstrate that the length of the diagonal of a square is equal to the square root of the sum of the square of each side. In psuedocode, they wanted to build the following construct:

repeat 4 (forward 100 right 90)
right 45
forward sqrt ((100*100) + (100*100))

Lots of alternatives were discussed, including using Dr. Geo. My favorite comment was from Pato Acevedo, who said:

[Modo Irónico on]

Claro, no puedo entender como fue que Pitagoras “descubrió” su famoso Teorema si en su epoca no existian calculadoras

[Modo Irónico Off]

But eventually—albeit with some intervention on my part—the discussion turned towards how to modify the Turtle Art activity. I put together a tutorial (See Patching Turtle Art) with the hope that not only would I be satisfying the immediate needs of the teachers, but also, showing them that in fact they could, themselves, make the necessary changes to the program to meet their needs. I am hoping that I didn’t make it too easy for them and that some of them will risk making changes—creating new instruments. The beauty of FOSS is that if the permutation group doesn’t allow you to “trisect an angle”, you can always modify the group. A dialog between teachers and developers has begun. The next step is for some of the teachers to become developers.

What is the connection the XP announcement? Simply that it is a real shame that Microsoft is not using their vast resources to expand the opportunities for children by reaching to places not already being serviced by OLPC. Regardless of the merits of XP, they could have immediate and lasting impact by covering a space outside of the range of the Peruvian permutation group. Pamela Jones and Sean Daly wrote a more thorough analysis of the XP story for Groklaw (See Interview with Walter Bender from Sugar Labs).

2. Oversight board: The Sugar Labs oversight board met on IRC this week. Highlights include a report that final agreement between Sugar Labs and the SFC has been approved; the creation of the BugSqaud; the creation of the deployment team pages; and the unveiling of a new Sugar Labs (Minutes can be found in the wiki. The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 3 October at 14.00 (UTC).

There is an email thread (“Executive Director - some benefits and risks”) for discussing the pros and cons of having an executive director. Please share your thoughts with the community.

3. Roadmap: Marco Pesente Gritti and Simon Schampijer have been documenting the discussion of our 0.84 goals in the wiki (here). They have assigned owners and peers to all groups and started to assign owners to each feature. You can find orphaned items under “Unassigned” in each section. Please give them a home.

4. Amazability: Kenneth Ingham is preparing to release Adept1, a natural-language speech-based product under a GPLv3 license (See amazability.com). He is looking for help; please contact him at ken AT amazability.com.

5. Minutes: Given the sudden plethora of Sugar meetings, I added a new category in the wiki for meeting minutes. Going to Catagory:Meeting minutes is a one-stop page for finding all the meeting minutes in the wiki.

Community jams and meetups

6. Workshop of Telematics: Luis Michelena from the faculty of engineering at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, will be using Sugar as a central theme for the projects to be carried out by students. Project suggestions most welcome.

Tech Talk

7. Sugar control panel: As a last-minute patch for 0.82, Simon Schampijer added a scrolled window to the Sugar control panel main view; Kim Quirk had pointed out that in some languages, not all of the icons fit on the fixed-sized panel. Thanks to Andrés Ambrois for his patch. The Sugar team has settled on a long-term solution using hippo for this issue. In the upcoming week, Simon plans to work on the first items in his 0.84 list (mainly control panel) and he will keep on working on the roadmap.

8. Developers meeting: The next Sugar developers meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 25 September at 14.00 (UTC). At this meeting, we want to form the Sugar Labs Bugsquad, a quality assurance (QA) team for Sugar. The squad will keep track of current bugs and try to make sure that major bugs do not go unnoticed by developers. You do not need any programming knowledge to be in the Bugsquad; in fact it is a great way to return something to the Sugar community if you cannot program. The Sugar Labs bugsquad is modeled on the GNOME bugsquad.

9. Design meeting: Eben Eliason reports that the first design meeting was a bit more technical than anticipated, but we did make some progress on a visual clipboard API and icon reviews Minutes can be found in the wiki.

10. API documentation: David Farning has been leading an effort to document the Sugar API. With help from Pauli Virtanen, Janet Swisher, and Marco Pesenti Gritti, we now have a wiki-based tool (See sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com). Follow the instructions at getting started. Don’t worry about being perfect, someone will come along and clean up the docstrings before they are committed back to the git tree. (The patches are flowing into the git tree correctly, but if you find bugs, please let us know: this is the first time pydocweb has been used “in the wild.”)

11. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

  • playgo-4
  • etoys-93
  • turtleart-11
  • tuxpaint-2
  • videochat-7
  • moon-5
  • write-59
  • calculate-24

and some Sugar improvements in the latest joyride:

  • sugar-artwork 0.81.2
  • sugar-toolkit 0.82.10
  • sugar 0.82.8

along with updates to some other platform components:

  • telepathy-salut 0.3.5
  • etoys-3.0.2153

Sugar Labs

12. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). Deployment feedback was a major topic of discussion this week.

Posted 22 September 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2008-09-15

Sugar Digest

1. Windows pain: It was announced this week that Microsoft would be conducting a pilot program in Perú with Windows running on the OLPC-XO hardware (Please see LAPTOP CON WINDOWS). This announcement has dominated the discussion on the Sur mailing list and has given rise to fear, uncertainty, and the spreading of much misinformation about GNU/Linux and Sugar. For example, it was posted to the list that one needed Windows in order to run Java and Flash programs and that one had to weigh the Write Activity against the hundreds of educational programs available for Windows. All that has been announced so far is a pilot; Perú remains committed to Sugar and FOSS.

It is important that the Sugar community keep united and focused on providing a great educational experience to children everywhere. We need to work together to demonstrate to decision-makers that Sugar and FOSS solutions will lead to improved learning and academic outcomes, improved national economic competitiveness through the development of a creative society, and that the total cost of technology ownership, including recurrent and “hidden” costs and external dependencies argues favorably for FOSS solutions.

2. Deployment Team: A Sugar Labs Deployment Team has been formed to voice and support the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community and to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and between Sugar user and Sugar developers (You can follow the development in the wiki at Development Team). We plan to meet biweekly on irc.freenode.net, Channel #sugar-meeting as we begin getting ourselves organized. Minutes from the last meeting are posted in the wiki.

3. Guides to action: One of initial tasks of the Deployment Team is the creation of some guides to action. In parallel with the OLPC Deployment Guide we had written in support of large-scale OLPC/Sugar deployments, we are creating guides to community outreach (Yes Sarah Palin, we think community organizing is a useful and positive endeavor) and Small Sugar deployments, which we hope will facilitate more grassroots use of Sugar (Please contribute to these guides at Guide to Community Outreach and Small Development Guide).

4. Category:Stub: There are a number of pages in the wiki that could use some tender loving care. Please see Category:Stub for a list of where you could help us with our documentation efforts.

5. Feedback: We continue to get helpful feedback from the field regarding Sugar and Sugar Activities. Of note is the blog being written by student in Australia being mentored by Bill Kerr (xo-whs blog).

6. Etoys refresh: Kim Rose reports that the Etoys team launched the redesigned squeakland.org website this week. There is much improved content and tutorials. It features a new Etoys release for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux which is compatible with the OLPC version now. Example projects are embedded in the website and viewable with the Squeakland browser plugin. On the XO, visiting these projects downloads them to the Journal instead.

7. FUDCon: Christoph Derndorfer wrote up notes from the Sugar Labs meeting at FUDCon. (For those of you not familiar with FUDCon, it is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. The name derives from FUD—an acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt, a typical tactic used by the opponents of free and open source projects to prevent their widespread adoption—and con—in opposition or disagreement with; against.) At the meeting, an impressive list of todos was generated (Please see FUDCon notes).

Community jams and meetups

8. Traducción jam: We are considering a translation jam the week of 20 October in Lima, Perú to translate the Sugar FLOSS manuals into Spanish (and Aymará)? If you are interested in joining us (in person or remotely) please contact with Raphael Ortiz (dirakx AT gmail.com) or me (walter AT sugarlabs.org).

9. Aymará jam: Yama Ploskonka organized the “Trasnoche de Traducción Aymará” in La Paz, Bolivia last weekend. He reports that despite the political unrest, about a dozen volunteers made progress towards an Aymará translation of Sugar.

10. K–12 Open Minds Conference: Sugar Labs will be represented at the Open Minds Conference in Indianapolis at the end of the month. The conference, which is designed to make free and open-source software and system more available and easier to use by K–12 educators, will offer a great forum for feedback about how we can improve upon Sugar outreach efforts.

Tech Talk

11. Report from engineering: Simon Schampijer continued this week in fixing bugs and smaller regressions for the 8.2 release. In collaboration with nearly the whole tech team we landed the discard network history feature for the control panel #7480. Simon continued with Marco Pesenti Gritti to clean up the bundlebuilder so that rpm packaging of activities gets easier and did some work on landing the activities in Fedora rawhide. Meanwhile, Marco has been chasing down memory leaks in order to lesson the frequency of out of memory problems. He found a dbus-python leak for which he has submitted a patch upstream.

12. Sugarbot: Zach Riggle reported on his progress work on Sugarbot, a graphical user interface automation utility for Sugar. We hope to land his work in sugar-jhbuild and the buildbot soon, as it has potential for helping with testing as we continue to improve Sugar and the Sugar Activity community grows.

13. Pydocweb: David Farning has been testing a new tool, pydocweb, for writing API documentation. The tool can be used to collaboratively edit docstrings in a Python module (in this case, Sugar) via the web, and merging changes made easily back to the sources (Please see Sugar Pydocweb).

14. Activity updates: There are updates available:

  • browse-98
  • journal-99
  • gmail-5
  • etoys-92
  • log-16
  • read-52
  • paint-23
  • write-58
  • implode-5
  • terminal-17

Sugar Labs

15. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). This week, the focus is clearly on the discussion about Sugar Labs membership.

Posted 15 September 2008 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °