[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-04-27

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest ===

1. A teacher in Uruguay, Rosamel Ramirez, initiated a discussion on
the Sur list (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2009-April/003166.html)
this weekend about her frustration with the volume of technical
discussion and the dearth of education discussion on the list. Several
proposals to address the situation have been raised, including Yamandu
Ploskonka's proposal for a fork, where teachers would have their own
list, and Hernán Pachas's proposal to use tags in the Subject Field to
indicate [Pedagogical], [Technical], and [Social] threads within a
single list.

It is always a difficult decision to fork a list. As Paolo Benini from
Montevideo pointed out, in a new project, where we are all learning
from each other, it becomes difficult to know where to ask questions
when the community is fragmented.

My hope is that the teachers will be willing to give Hernán's proposal
a try and that they do continue to participate, as they represent the
primary means of closing the loop between our engineering efforts and
our end-users, the children.

2. Meanwhile, Evita Preciosa from Peru asked if there were any recent
studies indicating the efficacy of Sugar/OLPC. I was quite pleased
with these results, as reported by Hernán (apparently, a formal report
will be issued soon).

Have there been improved levels of reading comprehension?

:Reading comprehension of children in primary levels has been improved
by approximately 50%.

Does increased use of computing (and Sugar) improve student achievement?

:Student achievement is measured by many variables; we have seen
improved reading comprehension, text analysis, and mathematical
analysis.

Have you seen improved logical thinking?

:We have seen improved the logical mathematical thinking, but we need
more work on this subject (more activities are need in this area).

Have students improved their ability to analyze the texts they read?

:They have increased by almost 60% in all primary levels.

Are students more creative?

:The texts produced by children and teachers demonstrate more
creativity; also there is improvement in writing and spelling.

Are the students gaining skills and problem solving skills?

:The students are using skills gained to help their parents (farmers
or ranchers) to improve their activities.

===In the community===

3. Daniel Drake reports that they just finished handing out 3500
laptops (running Sugar 0.82) in Paraguay: many happy children.

4. Luis Acevedo reprots that there was a Sugar booth at the FLISOL
2009 meeting in Santiago, Chile last Saturday on April 25. Sugar on a
Stick was featured and the response was quite positive; many attendees
were interested in trying it (See
http://picasaweb.google.es/patitoacevedo/Flisol2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCPD04-2G-9byCA&feat=directlink).

5. Caryl Bigenho reports that the XO computer and Sugar software were
a hit at the LAUSD InfoTech event at the Los Angeles Convention
center.

<blockquote>
So many people fell in love with the XO and wanted to know how to get
them.  When I explained the current situation of needing large orders
they were crestfallen.  But then they brightened up when I explained
the alternatives:

* Buy a machine from an online auction such as ebay.  Some parents
found this an interesting option.
* Run SoaS on the computers they already have or on others they can
buy easily "off the shelf." Both teachers and parents were interested
in this option.
* Create a really great new idea for using the XO with students and
apply for contributors machines to develop and test the idea. A large
number of teachers were interested in doing this.  It will be
interesting to see how many follow through.
</blockquote>

Caryl also invited the educators to sign up to receive information
about a new open-source interest group forming within the CUE
(Computer Using Educators) organization in California.

6. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar
Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at
http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized
all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full
agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal.
These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.

There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See
[[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009]]) where we will be
discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.

===Help Wanted===

7. Sayamindu Dasgupta has made some sketches of a Gnuemeric port to
Sugar based on its new libspreadsheet library (See
http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/spreadsheet/Screenshot.png). It would
be great if someone where to take on the task of making a proper
Gnumeric activity.

8. MIT Community Service is giving us a grant to support an intern
this summer to work on the Gardner School deployment (in Allston,
Massachusetts). Please contact Caroline Meeks if you are interested in
the position.

===Tech Talk===

9. We held the first "mini developers tutorial" this week on IRC. The
idea is to feature a topic in a five minute tutorial. The topic this
week was keyboard shortcuts. From the log
(http://meeting.laptop.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090423_1000.html) you
can see that we ended up going on much longer than the alloted five
minutes, discussing keyboard shortcuts more generally, but the
tutorial part of the discussion was indeed short and to the point.

If you'd be interested in hosting a tutorial, please sign up at
[[Development_Team/Mini_tutorials]].

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, 30 April, at 18:00 UTC. The
topic is "Using IRC". It will be run both in IRC on irc.freenode.net,
#sugar-meeting, and in chat on jabber.sugarlabs.org (using the Sugar
Chat activity).

10. Sascha Silbe removed Ubuntu Jaunty from the list of supported
versions. He will add it back once Xephyr and X inside kvm work (See
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-vesa/+bug/356133).

In a related post, David Van Assche reports that due to "the sad
state" of Ubuntu Sugar, he and his friends packaged Sugar for
openSUSE.

11. Sebastian Dziallas has put together [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware]]
to guide us through the process of using the Smolt project
(http://www.smolts.org/) to track the various hardware systems running
Sugar on a Stick. You'll need to use the latest snap shop, which has
Smolt included, in order to submit your hardware specifications.

12. Sayamindu announced that Pootle has shifted to a new and improved
home. Pootle is accessible from translate.sugarlabs.org (and
translate.laptop.org); All your user preferences, translations,
accounts, etc. are preserved and dev.laptop.org/translate should
redirect to the new address. The new server is much more responsive.
Many thanks to Sayamindu and the localization team for their hard
work.

===Sugar Labs ===

13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[Image:2009-April-18-24-som.jpg]]).

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