[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-06-01

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. [http://www.paraguayeduca.org/ Paraguay educa] team conducted a
two-week workshop on Sugar Activity development. It is great that
deployments are facilitating local Activity development—many of our
most popular activities have come from downstream, which is exactly as
it should be.

The Paraguay course was taught by Raúl Gutierrez, Bernie Innocenti,
Martin Abente, and Jorge Saldivar. They covered all the basics and
broke the students into project teams, which resulted in four new
activities: Scrabble, Pintando Fracciones, SugarBrain, and Conozco.
(The  detailed syllabus is available on their wiki
[http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Curso_Sugar_FPUNA].)

Raúl raised an interesting question on IRC (and subsequently in email
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-May/010965.html]) about
issuing a certification participation in the class. It has been a goal
that as Sugar deployments expand, affiliates of Local Sugar Labs would
offer services. We have a mechanism for approving the creation of
local labs. Is that mechanism adequate, or should we have a separate
mechanism for approving the certifications they award? (As someone who
would be looking to hire a developer, it would be reassuring to know
that Sugar Labs has confidence in their skills. This would suggest
that their be a community-based process in place.)

In the case of Moodle, only selected "Moodle Partners" can officially
certify a developer's skills in Moodle-based e-learning. They have a
"rigorous and highly-regarded assessment programme developed by the
international Moodle community." We have no such rigorous Sugar
assessment program, but perhaps the Activity Team should develop one.
In the meantime, I am in favor of deferring to our local Sugar Labs.

2. Meanwhile, we have surpassed the 3-million-served mark on our
activity portal [http://activities.sugarlabs.org].

3. CeibalJam, a community-based group in Uruguay, which was recently
acknowledged by Ars Electronica, has made yet another contribution:
[http://sites.google.com/site/sugaractivities/jam], an advanced
multimedia player for Sugar. (See it in action on YouTube
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpvN0ngsZw].)

Features include:

* multiple audio formats
* multiple video formats
* on-line radio
* on-line streaming video

4. Last week we announced Sugar-on-a-Stick Mirabelle. This week,
Thomas C Gilliard announced a revised Sugar-Creation-Kit DVD for
downloading for "sneakernet" and behind-firewall installs. From one
download [http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Sugar-Creation-Kit-09.iso],
you have everything you need to locally build a complete environment
for Sugar. See http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/SugarCreationKit09-Contents.txt
for details.

5. Alas, I was unable to attend the recent Deployment Team meeting,
but Tabitha Roder took detailed notes
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-May/010959.html]. It
reads like a great start to addressing the questions of how we build a
bridge between developers and deployments and between deployments
themselves. Thanks to all who attended and to Raul for organizing it.

===In the community===

6. Sugar will be represented at Linux Tag 2010 (June 9–12 in Berlin)
(See http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/).

7. Sugar World Cup 2010 will be held from 11 June to 11 July (See
http://wiki.suagrlabs.org/go/SugarWorldCup2010).

===Tech talk===

8. Aleksey Lim has been working on the Sugar 0install version of Open
Office for Kids. See [http://services.sugarlabs.org/ooo4kids/].

9. I added a few new features to the Abacus activity
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4293], including a
binary abacus and an abacus that lets you add fractions, e.g.,
1/2+1/3+1/6.

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (See
http://wiki.suagrlabs.org/go/File:2010-May-22-28-som.jpg).

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about
Sugar and Sugar deployments.

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