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Sugar Digest 2012-02-02

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.

Posted 02 February 2012 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2012-01-25

Sugar Digest

1. I was in Colombia last week and had a chance to meet up with some Sugar hackers in Bogota. It was nice to catch up with Rafael Ortiz and Pilar Saenz and to meet Fabian Prieto. The interest in Sugar in Colombia is on the rise, so it is great that there is a local community that can offer support.

In Cali, I met with Eduteka, a comprehensive education portal used throughout the region. I gave them a mini-Turtle Art workshop with the goal that they would be able to write a plugin for a simple USB IO device that they have built.

2. Speaking of USB IO devices, Tony Forster is having fun with the Freetronics Leostick, an Arduino “on a stick”, which were given out to every attendee of LCA 2012. It looks really cute. I haven’t been able to find a price for it anywhere on the Freetronics website, but it looks quite promising. Tony also pulled together a WeDo plugin for Turtle Art into shape (based on the work of Ian Daniher).

3. Speaking of Turtle Art plugins, I have begun working on a new plugin to explore nutrition. The idea is to have a variety of food “blocks”, each representing a polynomial description of their nutritional value. Numerical value blocks will accumulate factors such as calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, calcium, iron, fiber, salt, vitamin A, vitamin C, saturated fats, cholesterol, et al. The blocks can then be used to calculate the various nutritional value of a recipe or diet. Eventually, I’d like to add various operations such as the impact of cooking. Stay tuned.

4. Along with Pacita Pena and Martin Oesterreich, the first release version of the I Can Read activity is just about ready. Keep an eye out on activities.sugarlabs.org.

5. Quote of the week: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” –Richard Feynman

In the community

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

Tech Talk

7. The Devel Team has been making great progress on the new features for Sugar 0.96.

8. AlanJAS (Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn) has embarked upon an ASLO cleanup. See [1] for the details on all of his analysis work. There are many small tasks that need attention. Please jump in to help if you have time.

9. Sugar is a learning community: I love reading Sascha Silbe’s patch reviews. I learn something every time.

Sugar Labs

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

2012 Jan 7th-13th (45 emails)

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

Posted 25 January 2012 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2012-01-10

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.

Posted 10 January 2012 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2011-12-28

Sugar Digest

1. I was recently asked “Sorry if this should be common knowledge… Were you the key designer behind Sugar?”

Given the penchant for retrospective in the days before a new year, I thought I would provide a more long-winded answer than perhaps was being sought.

Much of the early development of Sugar took place in the MIT Media Lab. We began in the spring of 2006, in parallel with the work of the teams responsible for developing other aspects of the XO laptop’s software, including device drivers, power management, and security. One might ask how OLPC was able to create an entirely new learning platform from whole cloth, and do so with almost no investment in software engineering. The short answer is that they didn’t. OLPC solved the problem of how to develop the Sugar software with limited resources by attracting external resources—not creating them from scratch—while articulating clearly defined objectives. OLPC built upon decades of research into how to engineer software to promote learning and amplified OLPC’s staff resources by leveraging key partnerships within the Free Software movement.

Our principal partners in Sugar development were a small engineering team from Red Hat and Pentagram. The Red Hat team, under the leadership of Chris Blizzard, an experienced systems engineer, was tasked with leading the software engineering effort behind the development of the Sugar desktop. Lisa Strausfeld, a former MIT Media Lab student, led a team from Pentagram tasked with developing the interaction design and graphical identity of Sugar. In six months, this core group was able to produce a basic framework for Sugar upon which a community of pedagogists and software engineers could build learning activities. The team used an iterative-design process: rapid prototyping of ideas followed by critiques, followed by coding. We went through two to three cycles per week until we reached consensus on a basic framework. It was at this point, we were able to set higher-level goals enabling participation by a broader community of developers.

Like the XO development process, which was going on in parallel, the software development process required ongoing efforts to solve knotty and often unprecedented technical problems. To wrestle with these, the OLPC, Red Hat, and Pentagram teams met face to face on a bi-weekly basis. The broader development community, which over time was dispersed across five continents, was engaged in addressing the same problems, and met 24/7 in multilingual on-line chat forums. This was a global movement: the lead developer lived outside of Milan, Italy, a lead community contributor lived in Siberia, a testing team operated out of a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Significant contributions were made by a high-school student from Wunstorf Germany, an energy-management consultant living in Melbourne, Australia, and a student at the University of San Carlos in Brazil. The use of modern software-development tools, such as distributed source-code management and wikis enabled members of the development community to collaborate anywhere and at any time. We were also able to pilot Sugar in a wide range of contexts as well, getting hands-on experience and feedback in schools in Nigeria, Thailand, Cambodia, and Brazil.

Sugar was designed so that new uses emerging from the community could easily be incorporated. The journal was the brainchild of Ivan Krstić. Popular activities came from community volunteers such as Brian Silverman, a long-time collaborator of Papert who created Turtle Art, and Alan Kay and the Viewpoint team who created the Etoys learning environment. Others were commissioned from specific individuals, including a multimedia activity called Record written by Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak; the Sugar word processor, Write, which was based on Abiword and written by J.M. Maurer; the TamTam musical activity suite written by Jean Piché and his students at the University of Montreal; and some constructionist games from Harel’s MamaMedia group which were “sugarized” by Morgan Collett and Carlos Neves.

Sugar was explicitly designed by OLPC to be augmented and amplified by its community and the end users: once these initial examples were published, the floodgates opened and activities began to come in unsolicited. While we had the advantage of a highly publicized project—OLPC was the subject of almost daily international news coverage—we did not necessarily have direct access to the highly skilled software-development community we needed in order to grow. We therefore did outreach in the forums where these people hung out. In Free Software, that is primarily in chat rooms and at conferences. Blizzard and the Red Hat team established an IRC channel for the project that soon attracted nearly 100 concurrent users. Gettys spend a great deal of his time attending Free Software conferences, focusing especially on conferences in regions where OLPC was targeting deployments, in order to solicit volunteers. We also used word of mouth, leveraging both the MIT alumni network and friends and colleagues from industry.

By the end of 2006, Sugar had a basic system running which included all of the basic activities: Write, Browse, Read, Paint, etc. By the end of 2009, Sugar had hundreds of activities contributed by thousands of developers around the world, and the ongoing engagement of a global group of developers, teachers and students.

Sugar Labs

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

2011 Dec 10th-16th (52 emails)
2011 Dec 3rd-9th (48 emails)

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

Posted 28 December 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (2) °

Sugar Digest 2011-12-07

Sugar Digest

1. I was on a flight from Miami to Boston with Reuben Caron last night during which we discussed the hot-button topic of Flash games. Reuben was on his way back from a deployment that was heavy into Flash and was looking for a way to wean itself from a dependency on deprecated software that was both opaque and power hungry. Having just finished porting a Flash game to Sugar–it really is not so difficult–I suggested that we encourage the deployment to Sugarize their Flash assets. So we took a quick scan through their library and chose a reflective-symmetry game as a place to start. Two hours later, we had Reflection running in Sugar. Version 2, which I wrote on the train into Cambridge this morning includes collaboration and a mode of symmetry not available in the original Flash game. (At the urging of Sandra Thaxter, I have added a backstory with a blow-by-blow description of the porting process.)

Ultimately, it comes down to sustainability. It is my opinion that deployments are capable of building capacity and writing simple Sugar activities that they can tailor to their needs is a skill that pays off in the short term–no need to sustain Flash–and the long term–they learn to build tools to solve problems.

2. I’ve been busy this week with some other programming tasks as well: enhancing Measure and Turtle Art to take advantage of stereo input: both analog audio and DC resistance modes. As a result, you can now attach multiple sensors to the microphone input of an XO 1.5 and read two channels of data. I wrote a simple Turtle Art program to paint using a photo-resistor and a mechanical switch. Try doing that in Flash!!

3. Christofer is doing more Sugar hacking (See [1]).

4. Aleksey Lim has gotten multilingual chat working again on the Sugar IRC channels (Well, just bilinugual for the moment: Spanish and English). Instructions on how to use the service are found here [4]. Translation is provided by the Apertium project. The project accepts contributions to their translation system–those of you who are bilingual should please try to help.

Sugar Labs

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

2011 Nov 26th-Dec 2nd (45 emails) [7]

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

Posted 07 December 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2011-12-01

Sugar Digest

1. The Oversight Board (SLOB) election results are in. Congratulations to new board members Chris Leonard and Gerald Ardito. I am very pleased that they will be joining the board as they broaden our perspective and will help Sugar Labs be better tuned to the needs of our users. You’ll also be stuck with me for another term. I’ll do my best to help steer Sugar Labs towards ever more relevance to the learning and education communities.

Thanks too to Sridhar Dhanapalan, Laura Victoria Vargas, Nick Doiron, and David Farning for making the effort to run for a board seat. It is a sign of dedication to the project and much appreciated.

Luke Faraone deserves our thanks for once again organizing the solicitation of new members and running the election itself. It would be great if we could get a heads start on next year by inviting more of our user community, e.g., teachers, to join Sugar Labs. Please spread the word. Also, anyone who would like to help Luke on the membership committee should please contact him directly.

My apologies to two community members who were unable to vote because their ballots were rejected by their mail hosts. We are discussing with Mako Hill how best deal with this issue (in a more timely fashion) for next year’s election.

Finally, a word of thanks to Bernie and Mel, our two departing board members. Both of them have made numerous contributions to the project and its governance. Bernie has been a tireless advocate for decentralization of authority on the theory that the intelligence is in the leaves. Mel has been a stickler for clarity of process. Together, they have made Sugar Labs a better project. I look forward to their continued contributions as community members.

2. Last week was Sugar Camp Lima organized by Somosazucar. From all reports, Laura and Sebastian did a great job organizing the gather. Chris Leonard reports that there was great start made on Aymara and Quechua during the camp (Please see Aymara (Aru) and Quechua (Cusco-Collao)). Rubén Rodríguez posted a detailed summary of the progress he made on Trisquel (TOAST) during the camp, including the locale support for aym_PE and quz_PE. Bernie Innocenti traveled to Puno to help with a variety of logistical and infrastructure issues. Everyone sung the praises of Aleksey Lim (alsroot) who seems to be everywhere at once, helping people solve problems. We have a real community of doers!

3. Trinidad Guzman continues to amaze. Check out his latest video of his work with Turtle Art and sensors on the XO.

4. Carlos Rabassa posted a link to a fun game, Circle the Cat in the context of a question he posed to the list: “Why couldn´t all educational applications be as simple to use as this one?” My glib response was to quote the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

In other words, reaching to simplicity takes time and effort. Alan Kay chimed in about Hypercard, reminding us that it took years of refinement for it to reach its polished state. It is an open debate as to if and when Sugar will ever reach that level of polish and the path towards achieving it.

But while Carlos did not want to discuss the value Circle the Cat as an educational program, to not do so seems to skirt the central question of Sugar: it is an education project after all!! I am interested in how we can use a simple game or activity to drive the children to deeper principles. So I wrote a Sugar Activity inspired by Circle the Cat, but with a twist: The user is invited to experiment with the algorithm (Please see Turtle in a Pond)–of course I had to use a turtle instead of a cat. The game itself is fun to play and arguably of some educational benefit. But there is perhaps more to learn from algorithm development. For better or for worse, the user needs to load their algorithms written in Python from their Sugar Journal. This probably precludes the younger children from experimenting, but it presents an open-ended invitation to those willing to take the challenge.

Tech Talk

5. Simon Schampijer led a discussion of the new features proposed for Sugar 0.96. A summary of the discussion is found on the 0.96/Feature_List page.

Sugar Labs

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

2011 Nov 19th-25th (48 emails)
2011 Nov 12th-18th (45 emails)

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

Posted 01 December 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (1) °

Sugar Digest 2011-11-19

Sugar Digest

1. The Learning Team held a discussion about the Portfolio activity this week, which prompted me to make some enhancements. One request was the ability to export your portfolio to a PDF file. It turns out that Cairo supports a PDF surface, making it really easy to export PDF. So one nice by product of moving Sugar activities to Cairo graphics — which is a necessary step in our migration to GTK3 — is that it will be much easier to enable activities to export files to the Journal for printing. The other feature I added was the ability to make voice annotations on each page in your portfolio. These voice notes are played back when the portfolio is viewed. They are also saved went the contents are exported to HTML. Alas, PDF does not support audio, as far as I know. Please try Portfolio [1] and give me feedback as to how I can improve it.

2. Monday is the deadline for new feature proposals for Sugar 0.96. There are a number of proposals that have already been submitted (See [2]). Gonzalo Godiard and I have aggregated a number of proposals concerning the Journal in a collector page [3]. These proposed features are a result of the past month of discussion with the Learning Team. Additional feedback on these and all of the new-feature proposal is most welcome. Please add to the discussion on the “Talk” page of each individual proposal.

3. I mentioned last week that I wrote a plugin for Turtle Blocks that adds a palette for creating models for the Physics activity. (Physics uses a 2D engine called Box2D [4].) I’ve made a few additions this week, including a block that creates a gear. Building a simple machine should be a bit easier than trying to use the tools exposed by Physics. Of course, there are limits to what one can do with a simple. Working directly with sensors may be a more productive approach. But I have to say, it is really fun to create Box2D models in Turtle Blocks. (See [5] for more details on how to load the plugin and run it.)

It is difficult to strike a balance between giving the student a tool and giving the student the skills to make tools. I’ve wrestled with this quite a bit in Turtle Art over the years. Lately, I am leaning more towards exposing more functionality in the form of predefined blocks than asking that these blocks be built by the user. For example, I recently added blocks for getting mouse x,y coordinates, whereas before, I shipped Python code that could be loaded by the user to accomplish the same thing. Of course, View Source is still available. But where to draw the line is not obvious, at least to me.

4. Cherry Withers pointed out Mr Steve’s Exploratorium Blog earlier this week, but I thought it merited mentioning it again (See [6]).

Sugar Labs

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

2011 Nov 5th – Nov 11 (80 emails) [7]

Visit our planet [8] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Posted 19 November 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2011-11-13

Sugar Digest

1. I spent most of this week on Turtle Blocks. With the help of Ben Berg and Scott Ananian I managed to get the Cairo graphics conversion finished (Tip of the hat to Alan Aguiar, Tony Forster, and Guzman Trindad for help testing). It seems to run well, even on XO-1 hardware and quality of the graphics is markedly improved, i.e., no more jagged lines. New features include the ability to rotate text and images. I documented the process of converting to Cairo [1] as this is something we’ll have to do with all of our activities as we make the transition from GTK-2 to GTK-3.

Scott has been working on a module, gtkcompat.py [2], that holds the promise of making that transition less painful than we had previously thought. By including this module, we hope to be able to support both GTK-2 and GTK-3 from the same codebase, making activity maintenance easier. Once we have it working for Turtle Blocks, I’ll experiment with it on the other activities that I maintain.

2. Scott has a compelling demo [3] of one reason we are moving to GTK-3: Sugar activities running in a browser. This is just one of many reasons for this effort. See [4] for a more detailed discussion.

3. While I wasn’t wrestling with Cairo, I let me self get distracted by another Turtle Blocks project that had been on my mind for quite some time. I wrote a new plugin for a Physics palette. This palette lets you create Box2d databases to be used with the Physics activity. You can use Turtle Blocks to create precision models. I also expose a number of Box2d object attributes that are not available with the standard Physics activity, including: density, friction, restitution (bounciness), variable torque and speed for motors, and filled polygonal objects. Details can be found on the Turtle Blocks plugin page [5].

Tony has written detailed instructions on how to install a Turtle Blocks plugin [6]. But I find the mechanism too clumbsy for the typical user. I am tempted to create Turtle Physics as a separate activity. Please let me know what you think of the idea. Meanwhile, a decent plugin mechanism is sorely needed.

4. The Learning Team discussion about Journal enhancements in support of assessment continue. Gonzalo Odiard and I have put together a feature page [7] as a collection point for these ideas. Please comment as work is being on many of these ideas.

In the community

5. Only a few days left to announce your candidacy (See candidate list [8]) for one of the SLOB positions coming up for election later this month. It is important that we have a plurality of voices on the oversight board, so if you feel you represent a constituency within the community that is not being heard, please consider running for one of the open positions.

6. Sugar Camp in Peru is this week (18-19 November). Details are available at [9].

7. Hilaire Fernandes has prepared some English-language video tutorials [10] on DrGeo features. DrGeo is a powerful geometry engine written in Etoys.

Tech Talk

8. Peter Robinson has announced the release of Sugar on a Stick [11] Version 6 (codename Pineapple). It is Available for both i686 and x86_64 platforms and it features Sugar 0.94.1 [12] on a base of Fedora 16 [13]. It includes a lot of new and updated Activities as well as improved support for booting on Apple Intel-based devices. Download from [14].

9. Anish Mangal has announced the availability of an Alpha release of Dextose 3 for testing. For XO-1 hardware, please download from [15].

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list: 2011 Nov 5th – Nov 11 (80 emails) [16]

Visit our planet [17] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Posted 13 November 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2011-11-06

Sugar Digest

1. I am writing this issue of the Sugar Digest while once again watching the sun rise at Logan Airport in Boston. On the road, just back from Prague and now continuing west to Los Angeles to give a talk at USC. I have an opportunity to reach out to the freshman engineering class and impress upon them the pleasures of working with Sugar Labs.

Back from Los Angeles, where I am doing my final edits. The lecture, which was not recorded, seemed to go well. Lots of questions, including, “how do I get involved?” One professor with whom I met who designs curricula interventions for STEM in elementary and middle schools remarked that Sugar/OLPC XO was the first computer that made sufficient sense to him to merit bringing into the classroom!!

2. There are many reasons to participate in Sugar Labs, but for me personally I am motivated by opportunity it gives me to build within a community of builders. Last weekend’s Sugar Camp in Prague organized by Daniel Drake was exhilarating. Being back among the core Sugar developers [1] such as Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti Presenti, along with Simon Schampijer, Raul Gutierrez Segales, Benjamin Berg, Bert and Rita Freudenberg at brmlab [2], the Prague hackerspace, was a rare treat. We made significant progress on migrating Sugar to GNOME 3 [3] (Raul blogged about our daily progress here: [4]. For my part, I got a tutorial on Cairo development and gtk3 and this managed to get a few activities ported (Abacus with the help of Benjamin and Raul and Turtle Art with additional help from C Scott Ananian). We’ve begun documenting the porting process [5] in the wiki. The goal is to have the next release of Sugar run in GNOME 3, which I think will be achievable.

The beer in Prague was a treat as well: Tomeu introduced us to some favorite watering holes and shared some of his delicious homebrew.

3. While hackfests are a treat, what is even more rewarding is seeing the fruits of one’s labor. I was in communication this weekend with Christofer, a young hacker from Uruguay whom I have mentioned in past posts. Christofer has been using Unity on Ubuntu and has embarked upon a effort to build his own version of Sugar that incorporates what he sees as the best of both desktops. How cool is that?

Also, the Butia team continues to impress. In [6] a 10-year-old explains how he programmed his dancing robot. In [7], the Butia team explains how their system works. Great stuff.

4. My former colleague, Mr. Negroponte, is now saying that the creation of a learning deployment is simply a matter of dropping laptops from a helicopter [8]. Some of the discussion on Slashdot [9] is worth reading. Arguably there are other approaches to deployments. While I would love to have access to Nicholas’s yet-to-be-seen-in-the-field reading system, I still believe that a learning community that includes teachers and parents is vital. We have a long ways to go in our learning about learning and undoubtedly we will continue to make some mistakes along the way, but our basic theory of intervention, which includes doing, reflecting, and critiquing is sound.

5. The Learning Team has been discussing various ways to better utilize the Journal in evaluation. (See [10] for the discussion logs). Claudia summarized our discussion topics:

(1) Record in the Journal at any time: Here the intent is to enable editing the description, tags or the title at any time easily from the activity, and not have to wait to get out of the activity. Unlike the Keep button we have eliminated from the last Sugar version, no copy is made; it works on a single entry. [This facilitates the use of the Journal as a lab notebook, where notes can be recorded while the user is actively doing something, not just after the fact.]
(2) Open an activity-specific directories: This is to use the window that is currently used to select objects from the Journal from the activities, to open files in a specific directory, for example, to find examples in Turtle Art. [This will make it easier to provide and share clip art, example projects, etc.]
(3) Modes home / school: A problem raised by some teachers, is that Journals of his students (and school servers) are filled with music or games. With this proposal, Sugar offers you in a “school” when working at school or doing their homework, if you are using Sugar for their own interests, put your work in a “house”. What is recorded in the Journal will be this way, and also can be changed from the detail view. What is recorded in the Journal will be this way, and also can be changed from the detail view.
This mode also works as a filter, so when school is not listed in the Journal all the games and songs. Furthermore, it only makes backup servers that has been recorded so school, this solves the problem of server space and preserves the privacy of students.
[In discussing this, we agreed that home vs. school is perhaps the wrong dichotomy. Nonetheless, the ability to organize ones work into several different desktops has merit.]
(4) Operations on multiple files in the Journal: allow selecting multiple files for copying to a USB or delete them. [Martin Abente has a much of this feature coded already.]
(5) Activity-specific metadata: The work we have begun with the learning community. The idea is to record data related to the use of activity and display it in the detail view of the Journal. An example can be found here: [11].
These data will be used for searching the Journal and will be copied to the server when you have a backup.
(6) Default tags: At this time a tag is any text you type into the Tag field. This makes their use is unclear and not used much. We believe we can improved by making the selection of labels from a predefined (Which you can add new or remove) and display more prominently in the Journal (See [12]).
(7) Labels on the activities: We could assign labels to the activities to be seen into the Home View; for example, by selecting activities programming or media handling. [As a start, we can pull these labels from the categories assigned by the activity developer on activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO).]
(8) Audio Tags: We could add the ability to record a short audio associated with the journal entry. We have to think how to record, display and how to limit the length of the audio so it does not take up much space.
(9) Activity achievement badges: Portfolio and work activity showing Journal entries generated by other activities, could have an activity dedicated to show levels of achievement or badges earned by the done in other activities. While simple linear games like Maze or The writer is simple Turtle Art systematically define these awards, can not do something smart to analyze the quality of a drawing, a text or a melody. It could also be a space for the teacher provide feedback and reward achievement. We need to discuss this further.

Also, Claudia Urrea and Gonzalo Odiard have put together several pages in the laptop.org wiki for aggregating ideas: please add to [13] and/or [14] your ideas about those data you think would be useful to record when running an activity; and please use [15] to provide feedback on activities. (Note that we still prefer bugs to be filed at bugs.sugarlabs.org but acknowledge that it may be easier for many people to edit a wiki page than use our bug-tracking system.)

6. The latest sensor project [16] from Guzman Trindad is worth checking out.

7. I attended a lecture from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Subra Suresh last week in which he highlighted a joint program between the NSF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched as international joint initiative to address global development challenges. This new program [17] for “peer” projects. May be an opportunity for revisiting some of the unfunded collaborations we had proposed in 2008 and 2009. If anyone is interested in putting together a join proposal, please contact me.

PEER, “Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research,” capitalizes on competitively-awarded investments to support and build scientific and technical capacity in the developing world.

8. I was looking at a collection of African art recently and was inspired by one of the patterns I saw. It was challenging, but I managed a reasonable facsimile in Turtle Art (See [18]). It occurs to me that we could ask our young learners to find patterns–in nature, in their environment, in their culture–and replicate them programmatically. In the spirit of Barry Newell’s Turtle Confusion [19] but driven by the direct observations of the kids themselves.

In the community

9. Reminder: As a community member, it is important that your voice be heard. One mechanism is for you to participate in our upcoming election: We will be holding an election for three Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB) positions at the end of next month. If you are not already a ”member” of Sugar Labs, please send your name and an explanation of your contribution to Sugar Labs in an email to ‘members at sugarlabs dot org’. If you are a member, please consider being a candidate for one of the SLOB positions.

10. Laura Vargas announced that there will be a Sugar Camp in Peru 18-19 November (Details are available at [20]).

11. Is anyone interested in exploring how Sugar Labs might participate in Google Code-in 2012? Information about 2011 can be found at [21].

Tech Talk

12. Daniel Drake announced 883 as the official OLPC 11.3.0 release [22]. This is the first release to include Sugar 0.94 and it represents a big step forward in terms of stability. Congratulations to everyone who contributed.

13. Meanwhile, Peter Robinson is in the final stages of releasing SoaSv6. He is asking for more testing and feedback. It is looking to be a big improvement over previous releases and, as reported by Tom Gilliard, it is much easier to use on Apple laptops.

Sugar Labs

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

2011 Oct 29th-Nov 4th (32 emails) [23]
2011 Oct 22nd-28th (44 emails) [24]

Visit our planet [25] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Posted 06 November 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (0) °

Sugar Digest 2011-10-18

Sugar Digest

1. Daniel Drake has announced the second release candidate of the new OLPC software release 11.3.0, which incorporates the latest Sugar bits. You can download ‘signed’ images for testing from: [XO 1] [XO 1.5] [XO 1.75]

The final release is scheduled for 1 November.

2. OLPC OZ runs a discussion website on yammer.com for teachers working with XOs in Australia. It is a nice source of feedback about Sugar and 1-to-1 laptop deployments in general.

Recently, there was a posting that referenced an OLPC News article about a lemon-battery project by Sameer Verma. There was also a tip of the hat to Guzman Trindad, a teacher in Uruguay, who built a pulse meter. I am not sure how OLPC News missed all of the other great work that Guzman has been doing with Turtle Art and sensors and also the work of Tony Forster, who blogs regularly about various ways to engage children with simple sensor. His most recent posting is about using the accelerometer on the XO 1.75 as a seismograph. Check it out.

3. While Guzman and Tony have been using the built-in sensors and simple sensors plugged into the microphone port of the XO laptop, the Butia team in Uruguay has been augmenting the XO with an Arduino board. The latest video of their work is on YouTube. Be sure to watch past the ‘Schwarzenegger’ robot to see the XO robot programmed in Turtle Art.

4. A few weeks ago, Team Sugarlabs participated in the Boston Hub on Wheels bicycle tour (See Team Sugarlabs). Dogi road with an XO attached to his handlebars, but he wasn’t running the Turtle Art odometer program.

5. We’ve passed six-million downloads on ASLO.

In the community

6. The SF Summit is this coming weekend, 21-23 October.

7. The Prague Sugar Camp (Gtk3 Hackfest 2011) is next weekend, 28-30 October.

8. Reminder: As a community member, it is important that your voice be heard. One mechanism is for you to participate in our upcoming election: We will be holding an election for three Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB) positions at the end of next month. If you are not already a member of Sugar Labs, please send your name and an explanation of your contribution to Sugar Labs in an email to ‘members at sugarlabs dot org’. If you are a member, please consider being a candidate for one of the SLOB positions.

Tech Talk

9. Rob Savoye has managed to build Gnash for ARM. He has made RPMs for the XO 1.75 machine. To install his RPMs, add this .repo file to your XO:

[gnash-snapshot]
name=Gnash Snapshot for Fedora $releasever
baseurl=http://getgnash.org/yum/fedora/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgkey=http://getgnash.org/gnashdev.key

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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

Posted 18 October 2011 † Walter Bender § Sugar ‡ Comments (2) °