[Sugar-news] Sugar DIgest 2009-04-15

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest ===

1. It has been another insanely busy week. The highlight for me was
the FOSSVT meeting. Caroline Meeks and Pablo Flores drove up to
Vermont with me (in Caroline's Prius), where we spent the day with
more than 100 educators from the region.

It was great to have the opportunity to spend three uninterrupted
hours talking with Pablo and Caroline about ideas for further engaging
with teachers in Uruguay on the drive up—the key is capture and share
the very local discussions among teachers and to draw them into to the
broader discussion. We are considering designating regional amanuenses
who'd be responsible for communication between groups with the goal
that eventually individual teachers would become confident enough to
engage directly.

At the meeting itself, Sugar on a Stick was the main event. As soon as
we walked in the door, we attracted a crowd and soon the entire lobby
of the inn was full of smiling teachers running Sugar on their laptops
and netbooks. There was even an HP tablet PC running Sugar. I was very
pleasantly surprised at how well Sugar ran with the touch screen.
After lunch we gathered in a conference room where everyone had a
laptop and SoaS USB key. I was up front, giving an overview of Sugar
(using Turtle Art for my presentation, of course) while Caroline and
Pablo walked the room, helping people get started. By the end of the
hour, everyone was up and running—a roomful of happy Sugar users on a
wide variety of platforms. There were a few network problems and the
version of SoaS we were running didn't have the proper audio patches,
but it was unequivocally a very successful debut. Many thanks to
everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.

Pablo slept on the ride home; Caroline and I discussed strategies for
getting to the next step: engaging teachers in regard to using Sugar
for learning. (We have growing confidence that we can get Sugar into
their hands, but we want to help ensure that they get a clear picture
of the many ways that they can leverage it in their classrooms.

2. Caroline's call for short videos of Sugar Activities is one
mechanism we should use to spread the word on creative uses of Sugar.
Maybe we can set up a Sugar channel on dailymotion.com or take
advantage of their OLPC channel. A less bandwidth-intensive approach
would be to revisit the "Sugar Cards" idea. The Squeak project has
"Squeak Cards" (http://www.etoysillinois.org/search.php?q=squeakcards),
a model we could readily emulate.

3. Another topic we touched on was one I had been discussing with
Pascal Chesnais last fall: why do we use IRC for our own work, while
building Jabber-based tools for Sugar collaboration. It is great to
have IRC on Sugar, but it would be a good exercise to “eat our own
dogfood” but using more Jabber in our development process.

4. Saturday, Caroline and I will be at the Waltham YMCA, where we'll
be exercising Sugar on a Stick with children and their parents. The
computer room full of mismatched castaway PCs, some of which won't
even boot into Windows XP. Running Sugar on a Stick really does breath
new life into these machines: it boots quickly and seems quite lively
in comparison to Windows (I had the painful experience of having to
boot each of the machines into Windows in order to note the static IP
address assigned to each machine, so I had a great opportunity to do a
side-by-side comparison. There was no comparison.)

5. Jameson Quinn has been doing a great job leading our Google Summer
of Code program. We have been allocated  five slots, which is a great
vote of confidence in Sugar Labs since most organizations new to the
program only get one or two slots in their first year. We have been
conducting interviews with the candidates and should have a final list
early next week.

===In the community===

5. Olin Guru Camp, April 17

6. “Healthy Kids Day”, Waltham MA YMCA, April 18

7. Paris Sugar Camp, May 16,17

===Tech Talk===

8. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of Labyrinth
(http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078).

===Sugar Labs ===

9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2009-April-4-10-som.jpg).

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