[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2011-06-12

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

“What we need are notions, not notations.” —Gauss

1. I gather that I am the only one who had never read the
"Mathematician's Lament", but in case you haven't read it in a while
and need a refresher on "notions" instead of "notations", see
[http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf].

It is also always worth rereading Marvin Minksy's essays on learning
math: [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minsky_essays]

2. One of the pleasures of working in the Sugar community is that you
get thoughtful feedback on your work from a wide range of people. Last
week I got a request from a teacher in Uruguay for some new features
in Turtle Blocks. (I included one—coordinate grid marked in
centimeters—in Version 109. I also got feedback from Alan Kay and
Barry Newell about the merits of the inclusion of an Arc block, which
motivated me to finally write a Sugar Activity based on Barry's book,
''Turtle Confusion: Logo Puzzles and Riddles''. Check out
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4450]. Also, at
this weekend's Design Team meeting, I got very helpful feedback from
Sascha Silbe, Gary Martin, and Manuel Quiñones regarding the
enhancements I have been proposing to View Source (See
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements]).
Perhaps the most significant change is that I now put a copy of the
cloned activity bundle into the Journal, thus maintaining equal status
for the clone within the Sugar infrastructure. You can find the
current patches here
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/031838.html]
and here [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-June/031702.html].

=== In the community ===

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold
simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See
http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23).

4. The TedxKids at Brussels talks are online at
[http://youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA14C60FA101D1F4C].

=== Tech Talk ===

5. Peter Robinson is very close to releasing Sugar on a Stick Version
5. Please help us test:
http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-x86_64.iso and
http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-i686.iso

6. I cooked up a patch to the Edit Activity—Sugar's plain-text
editor—to enable editing files from outside of the Journal. I am
waiting for Nate Theis, Edit maintainer, to accept the patches, but if
you want to play with it, see my clone on Gitorious
[http://git.sugarlabs.org/~walter/edit-activity/walters-edit-activity].

7. Martin Abente has implemented multiple-object select for the Sugar
Journal. His patches are not quite ready for release—there is a
performance-related issue with unnecessary list regeneration that
Martin is working on, but having tried it, even in its current form,
it is really nice.

=== Sugar Labs ===

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

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Jun-4-10-som.jpg (80 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