[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-11-08

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. After a long absence, Turtle Art with Sensors is back! The original
fork was written by Arjun Sarwal when he was an intern at OLPC (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art_with_Sensors); however, when we
migrated Sugar to non-XO platforms, we stopped supporting this fork
due to problems with the alsaaudio library. With help from Tony
Forster, Turtle Blocks (the mainline version of the project) has a
sensor palette [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Sensors_Palette]
with blocks for sound (raw microphone input), volume, and pitch, and
on OLPC XO hardware, resistance and voltage sensors.

I used a Hall-effect sensor to build a bicycle odometer in Turtle Art.
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Bike_odometer.png]

Tony has begun writing up a detailed description of the sensor input
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors].
Claudia Urrea has documented how to build sensors
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Making_XO_sensors] that work with the XO
microphone input. Enjoy.

Also note that the Butiá robot team
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Archive/Current_Events/2010-10-26] added
Arduino support to a fork of Turtle Art.

2. There is growing interest in using Sugar as part of a
computer-science curriculum. I have started to accumulate links to
syllabi here:
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team#Sugar_Activity_development_courses]

===In the community===

3. I was in Lima last week where I got a chance to discuss some
details of the Peru OLPC deployment with Oscar Becerra. We spent much
of our time discussing how to better coordinate with community efforts
in Peru. Oscar is organizing a meeting -- tentatively scheduled for
mid-February -- which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for more
cooperation.

4. DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP, an international forum on development and
social inclusion through the use of ICT in Uruguay will be held on
29th and 30th November 2010 at the Uruguayan Laboratory of Technology
(LATU) in Montevideo, Uruguay.

===Tech Talk===

5. Aleksey Lim, Bernie Innocenti, et al. have been working on an
upgrade to the Sugar Gitorious server. They have been running a test
environment, jita.sugarlabs.org, with much success; git.sugarlabs.org
will be switched to the new Gitorious code base soon.

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Oct-30-Nov-5-som.jpg (58 emails)

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

-walter

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