[Sugar-news] Sugar DIgest 2008-11-04

[Walter Bender]

=== 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 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Questioning_General_Education. Previous
essays are  at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvin_Minsky_essays.

3. Knight News Challenge: Sugar Labs applied for four Knight
Foundation grants (all four a linked to from the DeploymentTeam page
in the wiki).


=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===



4. OLPC France: Lionel Laské announced OLPC CodeCamp in Paris on 15
November (See http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=OLPC_France_CodeCamp_15_november).
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 Haïti, 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 http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_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
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/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 http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/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 eb 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
(https://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-presence-service/sugar-presence-service-0.83.1.tar.bz2).
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
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-October-25-31-som.jpg).


-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org