[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-07-01

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

1. It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.

The center piece was the announcement of Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry.
May thanks due to Sebastian Dziallas and the Fedora packaging team as
well as Sean Daly and the Sugar Labs marketing team (we got
unprecedented international coverage). Simon Schampijer organized a
Sugar Labs booth at LinuxTag (see his write-up below).

The bookends were the FOSSed and NECC meetings. Caroline Meeks and I
ran a workshop for teachers at [http://www.fossed.com] and along with
Caryl Bigenho, Stephen Jacobs, and Mike Lee, we presented at
[http://www.neccunplugged.com/].

Caroline and I also made several trips to the Gardner and Lilla G.
Frederick schools, where we are conducting Sugar on a Stick pilot
programs this summer. We are running planning sessions with the
teachers and start working with the students next week. Both schools
have structured programs in the morning and open-ended discovery in
the afternoon. It is in these afternoon sessions that we'll be using
Sugar, as a compliment to the morning activities.

2. Two high-school students from Rwanda are interning with me this
summer. Eric and Peter will be adding some debugging features to
Turtle Art and following up with some classroom experiments when they
return to Rwanda in August. We'll take some inspiration from some
observations Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I made while debugging Turtle
Art project remotely. It was clear that it wasn't clear to the
programmer where in the code one was executing at the time of an
error. Eric and Peter's goal is to highlight the brick being executed
as one steps through the program. Raúl, for his part, has taken on the
challenge of adding hover-activated tool tips.

3. Alan Kay, Tony Forster, Ed Cherlin et al. have been in a discussion
([http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006853.html],
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006831.html]) about
teaching physics that highlights the difference between diagnostic
aids and physical thinking. Worth a read. K. K. Subramaniam (Subbu)
pointed to a parody
[http://solar.physics.montana.edu/tslater/montillation_of_traxoline.html],
"The Montillation of Traxoline" that really spoke to me about the
problem of "the 'intermediation' that has crept into the science
education in recent decades. It is no longer about direct experience.
It is about dealing with text in books, pictures on charts and movies
on screen. It is about literacy, not comprehension."

4. Meanwhile, in the spirit of Sugar, we now have
[[Modifying_Activities#Modifying_Physics]]  page in the wiki
describing how modify the Physics Activity.

5. Simon made regular reports from LinuxTag
[http://erikos.sweettimez.de/]. Kudos to Simon for all his work in
organizing the booth and to Tony Anderson, David Van Assche, Sean
Daly, Sebastian Dziallas, Bert and Eva Freudenberg and the Squeak
Team, Adam Holt, and James Zaki. Also thanks to our booth partners,
Skolelinux, X2GO, and Linux4Afrika.

===Help Wanted===

6. Maria del Pilar Saenz has put out a call for participation
[http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Convocatoria] in the various Sugar Labs
Colombia programs. "If you are a teacher, engineer, student, free
software enthusiast or related, you can collaborate. No matter the
experience you have, what Most importantly, the dedication that can be
given to projects."

===In the community===

7. I'll be giving a keynote at GUADEC
[http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/]; my plan is to both
introduce Sugar to the broader desktop community (with the goal of
recruiting more contributors), to sing the praises of the desktop—the
cloud is not the solution to all problem—but also articulate the need
for more simplicity along the entire spectrum from developers to end
users.

8. Squeakfest [http://squeakfest.org] will be held in Los Angeles
10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho.

9. There will be a Sugar track at the Free Software Week
[http://www.freesoftwareweek.org/] in Bolzano, Italy, the week of 9
November 2009. We will likely start the Sugar Hackfest the weekend
before (7 Nov.) in order to accommodate the restricted schedules of
some of our community members, e.g., students. Free Software Week
culminates with the South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2009
[http://www.sfscon.it/2009/]) and is sponsored by TIS innovation park
[http://www.tis.bz.it/].

===Tech Talk===

10. Fred Grose continues to keep watch over
[http://wiki.suagrlabs.org]. It remains a navigable site despite our
growth in content and diversity over the past year.

11. Thomas C Gilliard has added a Sugar VM
[http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/216653] to the Virtual
Appliance Marketplace.

12. Aleksey Lim announced V3 of the Sugar Activities Library
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org]. Aleksey merged and adapted the AMO
upstream code (the Mozilla Add-on codebase).

===Sugar Labs===

13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[File:2009-June-20-26-som.jpg]]).

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