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

[Walter Bender]

^Eva^Rita

-walter

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Walter Bender<walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> ===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
>



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