[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-08-25

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Vote early and often: There is one more week to cast your ballot in
the Sugar Oversight Board election. The Selectricity server was
(unexpectedly) down for maintenance this past weekend; if you had
trouble accessing the server, please try again.

2. Minsky on learning: On the flight to Austin this weekend, I was
rereading Marvin Minsky's "The Emotion Machine"; I came across this
inspiring quote: "We like to think that a child's play is
unconstrained—but when children appear to feel joyous and free, this
may merely hide from their minds their purposefulness; you can see
this more clearly when you attempt to drag them away from their chosen
tasks. For they are exploring their worlds to see what's there, making
explanations of what those things are, and imagining what else could
be; exploring, explaining and learning are among a child's most
purposeful urges and goals. The playfulness of childhood is the most
demanding teacher we have. Never again in those children's lives will
anything drive them to work so hard."

=== Community jams and meetups ===

3. Book sprint: We are in the midst of a week-long book sprint, with
the goal of creating manual for Sugar. Please follow our progress at
http://en.flossmanuals.net and feel free to create an account and help
with writing, illustrating, or editing.

4. Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores is spreading the word about the upcoming
Ceibal Jam in Uruguay (30 August and 6 September). Ceibal Jam is a
social movement independent of voluntary and open membership, which
seeks nuclear everyone who has an interest in contributing to the
development of software with potential usefulness for the Plan Ceibal,
is an effort to develop local capacity to create new applications and
modify Existing to address the specific needs of the Uruguayan
reality. On the occasion of this second jam, introductory workshops
will be conducted to programming for computers XO Plan Ceibal,
targeted audiences with different levels of knowledge, while also
submitted development projects under way and will form groups to work
during the days in different proposals programming (Please see
http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/viewforum.php?f=15). The meeting is
sponsored by the Catholic University of Uruguay, Larrobla & Associates
and Artech (Additional information is available at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ceibal_Jam).

5. Learning Content: On Sunday, 31 August, at 4PM, OLPC will be
hosting a public meeting to discuss (Please see
http://olpcphysics.eventbrite.com):
* Great teachers have great content they've spent their lifetime
developing—how can they contribute to OLPC/Sugar?
* How can engineers help teachers get set projects into motion?
* How can we together help with the transition from paper and pencil
to Sugar and computing?
* What learning strategies are OLPC working on?
Presentors:
* Caryl Bigenho, longtime teacher and senior OLPC support volunteer
* Brian Jordan, OLPC Intern, author of Physics Activity
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Bjordan)
* David Cavallo, OLPC VP Learning

===Tech Talk===

6. Watch out your teeth! Simon Schampijer and the release team are
happy to announce the final release of Sucrose 0.82 (See
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007911.html).
Sucrose 0.82 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform,
consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a
set of demonstration activities. Sucrose is released every six months;
the new release contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes,
and translations.

There are extensive release notes (Please see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.82). Also,
please refer to the roadmap for our next release
(http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Schedule) and join in the
discussion of the upcoming 0.84 release
(http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84).

Many people contributed to this release, including those who helped
with testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the wiki,
outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the
community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and
contributors who made this Sugar release possible.

I'd like to give special thanks to Simon for managing our most well
organized release to date. He has set the bar high for future Sugar
release managers.

7. Embedded Sugar: David Farning has been leading a discussion about
building an embedded-Sugar community. A group of developers have been
assembled to port Sugar to the beagleboard (http://beagleboard.org/).
They plan to use the Open Embedded toolkit
(http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page), which is both a
cross-compiler and an embedded package-management system. The team
will be using http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar as a point of
collaboration as well as the beagleboard mailing list
(http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard?hl=en).

8. Measure 19: Arjun Sarwal has release a new version of the Measure
activity (http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/Measure-19.xo); please send
Arjan feedback as there are extensive changes and enhancements.

=== Sugar Labs ===

8. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-August-16-22-som.jpg).

-walter