[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-07-15

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

1. As is evident from Gary Martin's SO map of this past week of
discussion on the IAEP mailing list, the pilot programs that Caroline
Meeks and I are running at the Gardner Pilot Academy and the Lilla G.
Fredrick Pilot Middle School are foremost on my mind. We are working
with three grade-level groups: second graders who are studying
geography (through the lens of their community), number lines, and
clocks; third graders who are also studying geography and the
application of their math facts to problem solving; and sixth/seventh
graders who are doing a digital storytelling exercise.

Mel Chua, Anurag Goel, and Greg Smith have written extensive notes of
their observations of our prelimary interactions with these young
learners. In gisting my own observations, I found that the students
are engaged, able to work at their own pace, each achieving a sense of
accomplishment. They stay on task, help each other, and excitedly
discuss their discoveries.

There are lots of little details in the interactions that have been
revealed even over this short period, things such as the ease with
which the children were able to insert their USB keys into a USB
extension cable as compared to the difficultly they encountered with
even USB slots on the front panel of the desktop; and the
in-retrospect obvious need to use integer rather than floating point
notation in Turtle Art. (The second-graders thought that 100.0 was one
thousand.) At the Fredrick School, we sent sticks and helper CDs home
with some of the children over the weekend. Only two out of five were
able to launch Sugar at home, but two of those who were unsuccessful
had been given no instructions at all, even to know that you need to
insert the helper CD in before booting from USB. We will report new
numbers next week.

2. Bernie Innocenti and I were invited to OSLO to present Sugar to the
Nokia QT software team. After an overnight flight, I went right from
the airport into a conference room and began my presentation, running
jhbuild from my laptop. About half-way through my presentation, my
laptop overheated and died. Not to be deterred, I pulled out a USB
key, borrowed a laptop, booted Sugar and kept going. The presentation
was not as smooth as I would have liked, but the room full of
engineers was pretty forgiving and noted that the only thing that
didn't crash was Sugar itself. The QT team expressed interest in a
wrapper around existing QT/KDE education projects such that they could
be run from Sugar—most of this work has already been done. We'll also
start investigating the work involved in adding QT bindings to the
Sugar toolkit so that QT activities could more directly leverage the
Sugar platform.

3. Wayan Vota talked me into engaging in an "Educational Technology
Debate" on Individual and Communal Computer Usage
[http://edutechdebate.org/archive/individal-and-communal-computer-usage/].
I sidestepped the topic and used it as opportunity to talk about
software.

===In the community===

4. Simon Schampijer has posted a
[[Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009]] page in the wiki with
information about the November 2009 Sugar Camp in Bolzano, South
Tryol, part of Software Freedom Week.

===Tech Talk===

5. Aleksey Lim has been working on an implementation of a redesigned
Sugar toolbar. There is a screencast
[http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/toolbars_aleksey.ogv] showing Write
running with a first pass at the toolbars. While more refinement and
testing are necessary, the initial look is quite promising—it seems
that it should enhance discoverability, especially for early readers.
One problem it addresses explicitly is the need to have some tools
always available, e.g., Stop. You can follow the progress and the
discussion on the Sugar Developer list.

6. While we strive to make Sugar discoverable, we don't have complete
success. Ed Cherlin has started a page in the wiki titled "[[The
undiscoverable]]" to describe Sugar features that you might have
difficultly discovering on your own. Feel free to contribute.

7. Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Gilliard, Sugar is now listed in
distrowatch.com.

8. Aclso heck out Aleksey's work on the datastore
[http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/versionsupport-project/repos/mainline/blobs/raw/1261a49d3e97c827b86acb48f64ab85c722e8fdf/datastore-redesign.html].

===Sugar Labs===

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

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