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Sugar Digest

1. Simon Schampijer and the Sugar Development Team have announced the
preliminary release of Sugar 0.96. This development release is a major
milestone as it is the first Sugar release to incorporate the Gtk+ 3
toolkit and introspection, better aligning us with the GNOME
development community and enhancing our long-term positioning
vis-a-vis growth, stability, maintenance, and relevance.

There are some rough edges, as would be expected from such a major
effort. Please report bugs!

New features include a port of the Browse activity to webkit.

There are OLPC builds available for testing and Sugar 0.96 in the
Fedora 17 beta.

This extraordinary effort began at the Prague workshop organized
by Daniel Drake. It was sustained by Simon, Gonzalo, and Manuq, with
help from Benjamin, Tomeu, Gary, Raul, Marco, Bert, Martin, Chris, et
al. Congratulations and thank you.

2. Block that metaphor: I am in transit to Korea; my first visit in
more than six years. The occasion for this trip is a lecture at the
opening of iLab, a new “Media Lab” at Pohang University of Science and
Technology. So I am wearing my “former director of the MIT Media Lab”
hat rather than my “founder of Sugar Labs” hat. Not that I won’t try
to inject a little Sugar into my keynote speech.

It was in Korea, 10 years ago, that I “revealed” the ”Seven secrets of the Media Lab.”, based on the symbols of the seven days of the
week in the Chinese calendar: sun, moon, fire, water, wood, gold, and
earth. Today, I am recalling four lessons learned — both at MIT and
at Sugar Labs — based on the cardinal directions: the azimuth of the
southern sky* can be used to align goals — without common goals, we
drift apart; the setting sun can be used to align expectations –
mismatched expectations can lead to disappointment regardless of the
quality of the work; the rising sun is the source of new light (and
new ideas) — a reminder to invest in community; and the steady
northern light is a message to leadership to provide a safe place for
taking risks. Many of these lessons were reinforced by my experiences
at OLPC and Sugar Labs.

* Note that since Korea is in the northern hemisphere, the sun peaks
in the south.

3. I get a lot of coding done on airplanes. What I have been
experimenting with lately are: (1) some work related to the Gtk-3 port
– lots of little tweaks; (2) some enhancements regarding touch — in
Turtle Art, Abacus, and Dimensions (AKA Visual Match); and (3)
different approaches to help — specifically, I’ve revamped the
introductory animation in Dimensions. Please try the latter and
let me know if you find it useful.
In the community

4. Details for eduJAM! the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo are
available. eduJAM will be followed by a code on the 13th and 14th.

5. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo
(May 17-19) and May 21-22 in Buenos Aires.
Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list:

2012 Apr 21st-27th 20 emails)
2012 Apr 14th-20th (15 emails)
2012 Apr 7th-13th (13 emails)
2012 Mar 31st-Apr 6th (14 emails)

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Sugar Digest

1. I spent last week in Miami participating in a “vacation camp” at the Holmes Elementary School in Liberty City for 3rd and 4th graders. The camp was organized by David Jessep and participants include Melissa Henriquez, Reuben Caron, Dan Lee, and Claudia Urrea. The Holmes laptop program, which is sponsored by the Knight Foundation, is challenging in that the school had been under performing by the Florida state metrics, so the typical class day is now quite structured. So there is very little unscheduled classroom time. The vacation camp presented an opportunity for the children to spend some informal time with their laptops and, for the first time, bring them home.

Melissa ran a Scratch workshop while I ran–no surprise–a Turtle Art workshop. In both workshops, the children were given a few warm-up exercises and then set off in small groups to do projects of their own choosing. For the Turtle Art group, I had them do the usual: one child volunteered to be the turtle and the other children instructed it in how to move about the room. Then they explored the turtle, pen, and color palettes. In our second session, I introduced a few new locks, including some of the multimedia and sensor blocks. We then designed an alarm clock of sorts: the children helped each other use the Record activity to take a picture pretending to be sleeping and a second picture, with a started from sleep expression. They taught their turtles to display the “asleep” pictures and then polled the loudness block, waiting for a conditional block to be triggered by a loud sound. At this point, the “startled awake” picture was displayed.

From there, the children went in many different directions, but one theme, dance, spread throughout the group. They began taking pictures of themselves in different dance positions and then using Turtle Art to animate their moves. Some of them incorporated sound and additional turtle graphics. One child, taking his own path, used sensors from the WeDo to control the speed of a motor. All of them wrote about their work in their Journals and used the Portfolio activity to make presentations to their parents at the end of the week. Pretty awesome stuff.

2. For reasons yet to be determined, once again we were turned down for Google Summer of Code.

In the community

3. There will be a OLPC/Sugar documentation sprint from April 6-10 at the OLPC headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Please contact Adam Holt if you are interested in participating, either in person or on line.

4. There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.

5. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).

Tech Talk

6. There is a new Etoys release candidate (5.0.2402 candidate 1) available for download. Enhancements of note include:

• single stepping in scripts
• attached watchers” following the object
• graph paper and number lines
• a scriptable calendar
• a sector object (e.g. for pie charts)
• ScratchConnect allows to connect Etoys and Scratch

Congratulations to Bert and the Etoys team!!

7. Aleksey Lim announced the latest in community-driven downstream Sugar distributions: Hexoquinasa, which is being tested in Puno. Aleksey summarized the goals of the project as:

• The possibility to launch Base Software in heterogeneous software and hardware environments;
• Using Base Software, provide access to various Content (Sugar activities, artifacts created by Sugar activities, books, etc.) created within the Sugar community;
• Using Base Software, provide collaborative functionality to support Social activity around the Content;
• Instruments and workflows to adapt Content and Base Software to specific needs that Sugar Deployment might face, including extreme ones like off-line environments and restricting hardware.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list:

2012 Mar 10-Mar 16th (36 emails)
2012 Mar 3rd-Mar 9th (69 emails)
2012 Feb 25th-Mar 2nd (27 emails)
2012 Feb 18th-24th (9 emails)

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Sugar Digest

1. “Papert, of course, is well-known as the proponent of “constructionism,” an educational theory which holds that students learn best by doing—often with little guidance from teachers.”

Perhaps I overreacted to a recent article about OLPC in which Seymour Papert was cast in the role of “anti-teacher.” I’ve worked with Seymour for more than 30 years and never once heard him disparage teaching or teachers. And nothing in the “Constructionist” doctrine suggests that teachers are not an important part of the learning ecology. That said, Papert is a believer in the human capacity for learning, where the role of a teacher is primarily to guide rather than instruct. And yet the mischaracterization of Constructionism and Papert persists, not only in the press, but in the writing of those who should know better, education researchers.

I apparently pushed the wrong button with an education researcher who “who dismissed Papert’s self-learning constructionism largely as a ‘myth.’” I have several issues with the characterization, not the least of which is the use of the modifier, “self-learning”. The same researcher back-peddled slightly:

I agree that Papert does not generally talk about cutting teachers out of the loop entirely, though he does discuss learning about differential gears on his own and discovering more about mathematics from them than he learned in most of his mathematics classes. So the sentence “Papert, of course, is well-known as the proponent of ‘constructionism,’ an educational theory which holds that students learn best by doing—often with little guidance from teachers” could be misleading in that it doesn’t fully articulate the “teachers as co-learners” aspect that Papert discusses in his writings, although it does convey Papert’s view that teachers should take a back seat to children’s interests and that some children may be inspired to learn on their own.

It is debilitating to all of our efforts that an educational researcher with such a shallow understanding of Papert is being widely quoted as an expert on one-to-one computing. But it gets worse still. The data that are being cited regarding the use of Sugar are terribly flawed. For example, rough estimates of what activities were used most often tells us next to nothing about what is being learned. And those data are interpreted in ways that are blind to the learning that may be happening. For example, to summarily dismiss activities—such as chatting—as “less sophisticated (and presumably less valuable) uses of the computer” is to miss the point entirely. When a primary goal is literacy, engagement in an activity that so directly encourages children to read and write is a plus. Alas, the old saw, “we value what we measure instead of measure what we value”, sums up the situation.

Meanwhile, the OLPC/Sugar Learning Team takes assessment very serious and has been developing a number of mechanism to dig beneath the surface. In addition to satisfying the needs of stakeholders and academics, we are also trying to develop metrics that serve the learner and the teacher. Hopefully our efforts will go some ways to shining a light on what is actually happening in the communities using Sugar—the good and the bad—so that we can learn and improve. In the meantime, we will have to withstand a storm of misinformation and distortion.

2. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is gearing up for 2012. It is a nice opportunity to get some new developers on board. As a community, we need to get ourselves organized: specifically, over the next few weeks, we need to identify potential projects that might attract interns to apply to Sugar Labs. I’ve set up a page in the wiki for aggregating project ideas. Anyone in the community is welcome to make suggestions regarding a project that you think would make Sugar a better platform. (Projects that are relatively self-contained tend to be better for GSoC since their is a finite window in which to work on it.)

If you are interesting in being a mentor, please contact me. Also, please encourage any talented university students you may know to apply to the program. Applications are not due until late March, but it is best to start the conversation sooner than later. (Note that applications submitted to Google must be made in English, but mentoring can happen in any language, e.g., Spanish. We will gladly help potential applicants with their proposals even if English is their first language.)

In the community

3. There will be a OLPC/Sugar documentation sprint from April 6-10 at the OLPC headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Please contact Adam Holt if you are interested in participating, either in person or on line.

4. There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.

5. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).

Tech Talk

6. Gonzalo Odiard has gone through the open tickets on bugs.sugarlabs.org and identified easy tasks for those interested in getting started as a Sugar developer. Bugs and enhancements with an “easy-hack” tag refer to tickets we think can be solved by a “newbie” hacker. The list is here.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list: 2012 Jan 28th – Feb 3rd (36 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Sugar Digest

1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I’m actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are respectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) “Points” calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Food-plugin.tar.gz.

Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me?

A screen shot is available at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/01/Food-plugin.png.

2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X last week. You can read about it at http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014837.html.

3. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our finances–Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report, so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding opportunities.

4. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for potential feature requests. Stay tuned.

In the community

5. There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow.

6. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18).

Tech Talk

7. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 have (for the most part) landed. Under the hood, we’ll see a migration to GTK-3. This is particularly important in “future-proofing” Sugar, ensuring that we remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism, written by Gonzalo Odiard. You’ll be able to highlight text in any activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting Browse to Webkit as its back end. Simon helped me with “write to journal anytime”, a feature that enables the user to takes notes stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha Silbe, Anish Mangal, and Aleksey Lim have added proxy configuration to the network entry in the Sugar control panel. Lots of QA to do, but the heavy lifting is done.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list:

2012 Jan 21st-27th (41 emails)
2012 Jan 14th-20th (28 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Sugar Digest

1. 2012 has started off with a big splash. In the OLPC demonstration of their prototype tablet–the XO-3.0–at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Sugar figured prominently. The XO surrounded by a spiral of Activity icons was everywhere. Featured in Ed McNierney’s (OLPC CTO) nonstop demo was Measure, Turtle Blocks, Wikipedia, and Fraction Bounce, among others.

The OLPC devel team did some tweaks to Sugar to enhance it on the tablet: the Frame can be invoked by dragging your finger to the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Clicking anywhere on the canvas hides the Frame. Works pretty well. Of course, there is a ways to go to realize a full touch integration. It was amusing to watch people use the gestures they’ve grown accustom to on their iPads to no effect in Sugar. The work on porting to GTK-3 (Sugar 0.96) will make a big difference there.

I made a few tweaks to Turtle Blocks for the demo: (1) I try to distinguish between a click on a block and a short drag of the block–it is hard to click on a touch screen without some x-y displacement; (2) I added a mechanism for changing the values in number blocks without a keyboard; and (3) I tightened up the toolbars so that they would fit on the smaller XO-3.0 display. While all of these changes are more general in their applicability, #3 is something we need to think about for all small displays as it is often the case that not all of the toolbar buttons fit.

2. In addition to the GTK-3 migration, we have a few more features queued up for Sugar 0.96. The one I am working on at the moment is Write to Journal anytime. The goal is to encourage more writing and reflection throughout the process of using an Activity, not just when you close it at the end of the first session. The mechanism I am experimenting with is to add a new toolbar palette to the Activity Toolbar that incorporated a text-entry field. By typing into this field, you can add notes to the Activity Description found in the Journal. It is my hypothesis that by making it easier to take notes while one is working, we may see more note taking and the vision of the Journal as a “lab notebook” may finally be realized.

3. Aleksey Lim continues to make progress on the “Sugar Network“, a platform he is developing in Peru in order to facilitate sharing of content, with an emphasis on the needs of off-line deployments.

4. Bernie Innocenti and Stefan Unterhauser (Dogi) are getting ready to migrate our servers to a new colocation site. We have been hosted by the Free Software Foundation, but since they are going to be moving to a new colocation site, we are planning to consolidate our servers in a server room at MIT. Details about the migration will be announced well in advance and we don’t expect any major disruption of services. Stay tuned.

5. Tony Forster, Guzmán Trinidad, Andrés Aguirre, Facundo Benavides, Federico Andrade, Alan Aguiar, Gonzalo Tejera, and I have written a paper about using Turtle Blocks with sensors.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list:

2011 Dec 31st-Jan 6th (30 emails) [6]
2011 Dec 24th-30th (18 emails) [7]
2011 Dec 17th-23rd (16 emails) [8]

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.