[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2011-07-25

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. The big news this week is Daniel Drake's announcement that OLPC has
released V11.2.0 for the XO 1.0 and XO 1.5 hardware. This is a
significant release in that it pulls in many of the newer Sugar
features into an official OLPC build for the first time.
Congratulations to Daniel and all of the contributors and testers who
helped to get these bits released.

Details of new features, known issues, and how to
download/install/upgrade can all be found in the release notes
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/11.2.0].

2. I spent last week in Argentina. I had a chance to get back to La
Rioja and connect with the tech team there and we shared ideas about
current and future plans for Sugar. (Alas, it was a holiday week, so I
couldn't get to any schools in order to get direct feedback from
teachers.) They are doing well, but are looking for more ways to make
connections to teachers; we kicked around the idea of setting up
Saturday clubs--a la Caacupe--to directly engage the kids in
programming Etoys, Scratch, and Turtle Art.

3. While touring Argentina, I spoke with numerous ministries of
education. In almost every conversation, we got around to discussing
the acronym ''du jour'', STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics). Any program that hopes to find its way into
classrooms—from Buenos Aires to Boston—needs to pay lip-service to
STEM. While STEM is less debilitating than its predecessor, “21st
Century Skills”, it is still very narrow in its scope and vision. But
in the case of STEM I see an opportunity. If we add the Arts to STEM,
we get STEAM. Now that could be hot!

4. There has been a discussion on Sugar-Devel
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-July/032339.html]
about a pulse sensor built for Arduino
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342192419/pulse-sensor-an-open-source-heart-rate-sensor-that].
It was observed that using the microphone-input port on the XO would
let do something similar using Sugar. Guzman Trindad has built a
simple sensor using an LED, a light sensor, and a clothespin to do
exactly that. See his video
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpkDmWFdw] using (of course) Turtle
Blocks.

5. Congratulations to Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru, the top three
winners in the Copa America. Again there seems to be a high
correlation between Sugar and success in international football. Also,
congratulations to the Slipstream/Garmin/Cevelo cycling team on
winning the Tour de France 2011. Slipstream is the pro team with which
the Sugar Labs/Chipolte U23 team is also affiliated.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Martin Langhoff has announced 1.75 contributor's program
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-July/032402.html
the XO].

7. Raul Gutierrez Segales has been making headway on the "no Hippo"
branch of Sugar and Sugar Toolkit. You can track the progress at

http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/sugar/no-hippo-sugar

and

http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/sugar-toolkit/no-hippo-toolkit

=== Sugar Labs ===

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

File:2011-Jul-16-22-som.jpg|2011 (45 emails)
File:2011-Jul-9-15-som.jpg|2011 (63 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